“Why, Why, Why?”
This past week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the Biden Administration for presumably withholding weapons to Israel. Netanyahu likened himself to Churchill and Israel’s war on Gaza to World War II, declaring: “Churchill told the United States, ‘give us the tools, we’ll do the job.’ And I say, ‘give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster.'”
Netanyahu stated that he had a hard talk with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken about America’s unacceptable behavior: “I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel.”
According to Netanyahu, Blinken promised the US would do better, to which–wait for it–Netanyahu replied: “I certainly hope that’s the case. It should be the case.”
But mum’s the word from the US’s top diplomat about how exactly the conversation went with Bibi.
Over the past two weeks, Blinken stood in front of the cameras on more than one occasion to tell the world that Israel had accepted President Joe Biden’s ceasefire proposal. Not so, quipped Netanyahu, insisting that he will not stop the war until he snuffs the life out of Hamas.
Biden himself, when announcing the ceasefire proposal last month, told the world that it was an Israeli one. Not so, quipped Netanyahu, insisting that he will not stop the war until he snuffs the life out of Hamas.
That Hamas was then promptly blamed for the impasse is, of course, a very old and familiar tactic–way older than Hamas itself. What seems new and kind of amusing is a US secretary of state and president willingly losing face for the sake of a depleted, discredited, notoriously ungrateful friend who is playing house in the midst of genocide.
But is it?
Now a quick dip into a couple more Bibi chronicles.
In 1998, when the Israeli prime minister wrecked the Wye Summit convened by President Clinton to “salvage” the teetering peace process, Clinton privately fumed: “That SOB doesn’t want a deal. He is trying to humiliate Arafat and me in the process. What the hell does he expect Arafat to do in that situation?”
In 2010, then Vice President Biden was dispatched to Israel to encourage Netanyahu to “re-engage” in the peace process. He was greeted with an Interior Ministry announcement of the creation of 1,600 new settlement units in East Jerusalem. Here’s how Ethan Bronner of The New Time York Times tellingly peddled the public indignity and indulged Netanyahu’s glib justifications:
A statement issued in the name of the Interior Ministry but distributed by the prime minister’s office said that the housing plan was three years in the making and that its announcement was procedural and unrelated to Mr. Biden’s visit. It added that Mr. Netanyahu had just been informed of it himself.
Mr. Netanyahu supports Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, yet wants to get new talks with the Palestinians going and to maintain strong relations with Washington. But when he formed his coalition a year ago he joined forces with several right-wing parties, and has since found it hard to keep them in line.”
I am citing these anecdotes because, by pure serendipity, I happened to come across them in my readings as I was watching the ceasefire farce unfold. That’s the beauty of Bibi: just one story about him is a stand-in for all.
Blinken and Biden have, of course, taken quite the drubbing for the extent to which they continue to endure ridicule by a treacherous ally. But truthfully, the ceasefire fiasco today is the peace process fiasco of yesterday; it’s the fiasco of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, siege of Beirut, and supervised massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla Camp; same with the 1987 Intifada in the Occupied Territories.
It’s also the fiasco of Israel’s siege of Gaza since 2007; its calorie count diet and “mowing the lawn” policy in the strip; its apartheid system in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; its 2018 nation-state law which stipulates that “the right to exercise national self-determination [in Israel] is unique to the Jewish people” and consecrates “Jewish settlement as a national value.”
Equally, it’s the fiasco of the current Netanyahu coalition’s charter that calls for the annexation of the West Bank, Israel’s slaughter and starvation strategy in the enclave, Netanyahu’s insistence on wiping out Hamas, which the IDF’s chief spokesman described a few days ago as “throwing sand in the eyes of the public”…
The history of the struggle over Palestine has always been riddled with gross Israeli wrongdoings. The early ones could easily be covered up or explained away by a US goliath with much heft to expend in an extremely favorable and forgiving international setting and an embarrassingly clumsy Arab one. The crimes we have seen quickly devolve into open fiascos in more recent decades are largely due to the hubris let loose by the extraordinary success in masking the older ones.
Hence the sad sight of a US secretary of state and president caught in flagrante because of the blithe indiscretions of a dangerously wayward and narcissistic Israeli prime minister. It is debasement, to be sure, as Tom Friedman called it, but it’s that because the world has so changed and the Jewish state and America act as if it hasn’t changed one bit.
In 1996, right before he was elected prime minister for the first time, Netanyahu met with Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s first ambassador to Israel, in the Knesset’s cafeteria. Bibi, of course, quickly laid out his vision of the way forward for both countries: “We have a joint interest. We have Palestinians in Israel, and you have Palestinians in Jordan. A Palestinian state on the West Bank would serve to radicalize the Palestinians in Israel and Jordan. That is not in our interests. We therefore have to work together to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
When Muasher begged to differ, Bibi shot back: “Mr. Ambassador, I think I understand the Jordanian position better than you do!”
All the same, on the eve of the Israeli elections, King Hussein, who never had much of a liking and mistrusted Shimon Peres, the leader of the Labor Party, received his rival, Netanyahu, as if to give the upstart the nod. The king was perhaps charmed by Netanyahu into believing that the two could have a good working relationship. Bibi was a relatively unknown quantity then, so the king could be forgiven, and not for the first time, for having a catastrophically wrong gut feeling.
It didn’t take the new Israeli PM long to return the favor. In September 1997, in front of Hamas’s offices in Amman, Mossad assassins injected poison into Khalid Mashal, then the chair of the movement’s politburo. Mashal was hospitalized and the agents were caught. To force Netanyahu to deliver the antidote and release Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, head of Hamas, and other Palestinian prisoners, King Hussein threatened that he would publicly try the assassins, storm the Israeli embassy where the rest of the assassin team was hiding, revoke the peace treaty, and cut diplomatic ties with Israel. Checkmate, Clinton informed his favorite Israeli, telling him Israel had no choice but to comply.
After the incident, Hussein fumed for months on end every time he met with top Israeli officials. He would repeat, “Why, why, Why?” He couldn’t understand why Israel would do this to him. Had Netanyahu been sitting in one of those meetings, he probably would have been very tempted to say: “Because I can.”
Should Blinken and Biden be similarly perplexed and ask Bibi now, “Why, why, why?,” I imagine his answer would be no different.
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On Another Note
Eric Hazan, who passed away on June 4, 2024, was a remarkable man, a beautiful mind, a staunch supporter of all worthy causes, including Palestine’s, and “no ordinary publisher.” Jacques Rancière, in SideCar, bids him a wonderful farewell:
…he was so much more than a publisher of revolutionary firebrands. Were that the case, what business would he have with exploring territories as remote from immediate political action as the landscape of eighteenth-century England, the dissolution of the traditional threads of narrative in the novels of Flaubert, Conrad or Virginia Woolf, the interweaving of time in the films of Dziga Vertov, John Ford or Pedro Costa, or the conception of the spectator implied by this or that installation of contemporary art? What, moreover, would lead him to publish a complete edition stretching to over a thousand pages of Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire? And to immerse himself in Balzac’s Paris? It’s not only that he was interested in everything and his engagement with humanist culture was far broader and deeper than so many of the ‘clercs’ who smirk at militant commitments of his kind. It was because he fought for a world of the widest and richest experience, and did not separate the work of knowledge and the emotions of art from the passion of justice. This man – indignant against all oppression – loved, more than sloganeers, those who seek, invent and create.