A friend of mine on the Israeli Right recently asked me what seemed to him to be a tough question to answer: two months after winning the election, what terrible things has Netanyahu actually done? “Forget what he’s said,” my friend told me. “You point out one really bad thing that’s happened.”
So I mentioned Bibi’s economic policies. And rested my case.
If I believed what I read in the newspapers, I’d be devoting this issue of BibiWATCH to the question of how the CIA kidnapped Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sometime during his visit to Washington, replacing him with a double — which was exposed, of course, during last week’s state visit to Cairo. (Egyptian President Mubarak was quoted as saying that the Netanyahu he met was a different man from the one who spoke to the U.S. Congress a week earlier.)
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s most important statement of government policy regarding the peace process came, as expected, during his appearance before a joint session of the U.S. Congress last week. To the assembled elected representatives of the American people, Bibi proposed three “pillars of peace” — which were received with more than a dozen ovations.
Israel has a tradition that state visitors are taken to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial before they go anywhere else in the country. Before they speak to the assembled Knesset, before they visit the President’s official residence in Jerusalem, even before they get to unpack their bags in the King David Hotel, they pay homage to the six million Jews whose murder is permanently bound up with the creation of the state of Israel.
State visitors to the United States, on the other hand, are required, upon their arrival in the country, to report to the CNN studios in Washington for an appearance on “Larry King Live”. Because of the “special relationship” between Israel and America, our Prime Minister gets to make part of his state visit even before boarding Israel Air Force One; he paid a “virtual visit” to Larry King late last week.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Israeli strategists came up with a great way to “sell Israel” to the American government. The Soviet Union, they argued, was turning the Middle East into a battleground of the Cold War. (I should point out that this was actually true.) Israel was the only pro-Western democracy in the region, and would gladly turn itself into the fifty-first state if only the U.S. would provide nearly unlimited arms and money.