Why Netanyahu is Not Qualified to be Israel's Prime Minister
November 11, 2010, republished August 28, 2011
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
In this report I am going to provide sufficient evidence to prove that Benjamin Netanyahu is not qualified to be the Prime Minister of Israel…. [It's] irrelevant to say that any of his most likely successors are even less qualified ….
When he was a cabinet minister in the Sharon Government, he voted for the expulsion of 8,000 Jews from their homes in Gaza. Gaza, now called Hamastan, is a proxy of Iran. Armed by increasingly deadly weapons from Iran, Hamastan constitutes a strategic threat to Israel from the south. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, another Iranian and well-armed proxy, threatens Israel from the north. This perilous state of affairs, for which Netanyahu is to no small extent responsible, should have prompted Israelis to relegate him to the political wilderness in the February 2009 national elections. Instead, by voting for the Likud Party, they [less than a third of the electorate] made him Israel's Prime Minister.
Four months later, on June 14, at Bar-Ilan University, Netanyahu endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria …. From what source did Netanyahu derive the authority to make [t]his decision … It's quite clear that the decision was made without public or Knesset debate….
While Netanyahu was a member of Sharon's ethnic cleansing Government, he gave a speech at the prestigious Herzliya Conference. He there declared that "the Declaration of Independence" depicts Israel as both Jewish and democratic." Let us examine this statement.
First of all, the word "democracy" does not appear in the Declaration of Independence…. Second, to say that the Declaration "depicts Israel as both Jewish and democratic" is grossly misleading.
Not only does the Declaration proclaim Israel as a Jewish state, but that alone is Israel's raison d'etre. It is simply false to put "Jewish" and "democratic" on the same level. To put it more clearly: The only justification for Israel's re-establishment in 1948 is the Biblical heritage of the Jewish people; and it is an unmitigated falsehood to describe that heritage, and therefore the Sinai Covenant, as a charter for democracy. In fact, the Declaration tacitly rejects that Covenant.
The Declaration proclaims that the State "will ensure complete equality of … political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion …"
But there is much more than Netanyahu's poverty-stricken commitment to a Jewish commonwealth—although it is the root cause of his caving into American pressure on the Palestinian state issue. Here I will cite at length, with interspersed italicized comments of my own, [Caroline] Glick's article in The Jerusalem Post [of November 19, 2010]. She writes: "Netanyahu boasts that that he received three major payoffs from Obama in exchange for his agreement to ban Jewish construction [in Judea and Samaria] and discuss land surrenders with [the Palestinian Authority, a consortium of terrorists] is enough to disqualify Netanyahu as PM.
As for the three payoffs: "First, he claims that Obama agreed not to renew his demand that Jews be denied their property rights. Second, he says the administration agreed to send Israel 20 more F-35s…. Glick counters as follows: "The first payoff is nothing more than the foreign policy equivalent of buying the same dead horse twice. Obama led Netanyahu to believe he has set aside his demand that Jews be denied property rights last November, when Netanyahu announced the first construction freeze [in Judea and Samaria]. Yet Obama repeated his demands even before the last freeze ended. Obama has no credibility on this issue…."
Glick continues: "The F35 deal is simply bizarre. Israel needs the F-35 to defend against enemies like Iran. Yet the administration claims that its agreement to send Israel the F-35s is contingent on Israel signing a peace deal with the Palestinians. In other words, the Obama administration is giving the PLO power to veto American military assistance by saying no to peace."
"Finally, there is the administration's pledge to support Israel at the UN for a year. What this pledge actually means is that a year from now, the Obama administration will present the deal as an excuse to abandon what has been the policy of every US administration since Lyndon Johnson and stop blocking Anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Security Council."
This, according to Glick, is what Netanyahu fears most, because it would readily lead to a UN-endorsed Palestinian state in all of Judea and Samaria and in large parts of Jerusalem, and with the Palestinians still refusing to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
But Netanyahu has already agreed to a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, which would include East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount; and any peace treaty following that betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people would not be worth the paper it's written on.
Glick wants Israel—but that means Netanyahu—to go on the offensive. She wants (1) Israel to pass a law that permits the filing of universal jurisdiction claims in Israel against citizens of states that allow Israelis to be sued. She wants (2) Israel to support people abroad who want to discredit the UN, especially the International Criminal Court. She wants (3) Israel to pursue deeper economic and political ties with India, China, and Japan.
The present writer has long advocated actions (2) and (3), but with the understanding that Israel would have to be led by a very different kind of Government to implement such actions. Nothing hinders Israel's government more than its fear of jeopardizing its democratic reputation, which alone endows this country with legitimacy and its ruling elites with respectability. But isn't it obvious that Israel's democratic reputation, whether deserved or not, is now worthless and even counter-productive if only because it induces Israeli government to exercise suicidal self-restraint in dealing with Arab terrorists?
Ms. Glick's excellent article is entitled "Facing our fears." With all due respect, she has not identified what Israel must do to liberate itself from these fears. That done, her readers will at last understand why Benjamin Netanyahu is not qualified to be Israel's Prime Minister.◙