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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 3/23/15

Bibi Wins with Racism and Revoked Promise

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Reality crashed down on those who had hoped the March 17 Knesset elections might lead to a more moderate future Israeli leadership.

The election returns brought the news, Benjamin Netanyahu had won again.

He won in large part by revoking his earlier pledge to support a Palestinian state, and by using last-hour racist warnings to bring out hard right voters.

Because Netanyahu's Likud party won the largest number of seats (30) in the new Israeli parliament (120 total), he will play the major role in organizing the next government.

Even liberal Zionist Thomas Friedman had to acknowledge that Netanyahu won with "dirty" politics and the use of "dog-whistle" language. Friedman wrote in his New York Times column that "You cannot win that dirty and just walk away like nothing has happened."

"The biggest losers in all of this, besides all the Israelis who did not vote for Netanyahu, are American Jews and non-Jews who support Israel. What Bibi did to win this election was move the Likud Party from a center-right party to a far-right one. The additional votes he got were all grabbed from the other far-right parties -- not from the center.

"When the official government of Israel is a far-right party that rejects a two-state solution and employs anti-Arab dog whistles to get elected, it will split the basic unity of the American Jewish community on Israel."

Republican House Speaker John Boehner showed little sympathy for American Jews like Friedman who lament the loss of what Friedman calls "the basic unity of the American Jewish community on Israel."

As soon as Netanyahu's victory was secured, Boehner announced his trip to Tel Aviv to embrace the foreign leader he had invited to deliver an historically unprecedented campaign address which attacked President Obama's efforts to secure a nuclear agreement with Iran.

President Obama, who is known to congratulate the coach of a Super Bowl champion within minutes of the final whistle, waited two full days before calling Netanyahu to congratulate him and, on the same call, issue a stern reminder that Netanyahu's campaign tactics damaged hopes for peace in he region.

Obama's delayed call was a carefully calabrated slight, which Jon Stewart (see video below) mocked, as only he could get away with, employing his best faux Jewish mother voice to lament, "You didn't call, you didn't write."

The "special relationship" between the U.S. and Israel, which politicians continually say is built on "shared values," has been exposed as nothing less than an arranged marriage forced on the American public by Zionist apologists, Zionist enforcers (AIPAC) military contractors, lobbyists, well-funded politicians, hard right fundamentalist Christians, and anti-BDS Christian church leaders.

That manufactured "shared values" relationship, where one partner has militarily and illegally occupied a neighboring population for almost 50 years, is coming unraveled.

Unraveled, that is, as long as Barack Obama is in the White House. The President, unfazed, and no doubt still seething over Netanyahu's insulting speech to Congress, keeps John Kerry on duty, where the Secretary of State continues to work for a nuclear agreement with Iran and the 5+ negotiating nations.

Two years remain before a new president takes office, two years during which Obama has the opportunity to exert his executive power to follow his own higher moral level of international conduct.

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James Wall served as a Contributing Editor of The Christian Century magazine, based in Chicago, Illinois, from 1999 through 2017. From 1972 through 1999, he was editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine. Many sources have influenced (more...)
 

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