Lieberman and Wiping Countries off the face of the Map
Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan night club bouncer, is now foreign minister of Israel. The world has had a lot of fun laughing at the pronouncements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who stands falsely accused of threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the map. But Ahmadinejad has protested that it would be wrong to kill large numbers of civilians.
In contrast, Lieberman has threatened to wipe at least two countries, Egypt and Palestine, off the map. Monstrously, he suggested bombing the Aswan Dam, which would have the effect of murdering all 80 million Egyptians and sweeping them into the Mediterranean in a vast continental African tsunami.
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Lieberman promptly announced on assuming office that the Mideast peace process is dead. Well, at least we have an outbreak of frankness.
Whereas Ahmadinejad was humiliated by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger on his visit to that university, which provoked public protests, Lieberman's acceptance into the Israeli government has been greeted mildly and he was allowed to come to the Brookings Institution and meet with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Lieberman is a Central/Eastern European ultra-nationalist in the mold of Slobodan Milosevic and Jorg Haider, and it is shameful that he was allowed into the government and more shameful that this travesty has passed without a peep in the civilized world.
The The Electronic Intifada lists "Some of Avigdor Lieberman's infamous statements":
' # In 1998, Lieberman called for the flooding of Egypt by bombing the Aswan Dam in retaliation for Egyptian support for Yasser Arafat.
# In 2001, as Minister of National Infrastructure, Lieberman proposed that the West Bank be divided into four cantons, with no central Palestinian government and no possibility for Palestinians to travel between the cantons.
# In 2002, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Lieberman in a Cabinet meeting saying that the Palestinians should be given an ultimatum that "At 8am we'll bomb all the commercial centers ... at noon we'll bomb their gas stations ... at two we'll bomb their banks ..."
# In 2003, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Lieberman called for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel to be drowned in the Dead Sea and offered to provide the buses to take them there.
# In May 2004, Lieberman proposed a plan that called for the transfer of Israeli territory with Palestinian populations to the Palestinian Authority. Likewise, Israel would annex the major Jewish settlement blocs on the Palestinian West Bank. If applied, his plan would strip roughly one-third of Israel's Palestinian citizens of their citizenship. A "loyalty test" would be applied to those who desired to remain in Israel. This plan to trade territory with the Palestinian Authority is a revision of Lieberman's earlier calls for the forcible transfer of Palestinian citizens of Israel from their land. Lieberman stated in April 2002 that there was "nothing undemocratic about transfer."
# Also in May 2004, he said that 90 percent of Israel's 1.2 million Palestinian citizens would "have to find a new Arab entity" in which to live beyond Israel's borders. "They have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost," he said.
# In May 2006, Lieberman called for the killing of Arab members of Knesset who meet with members of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.'
Nice.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/02/2009 01:16:00 AM
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16 Comments:
Lieberman's brutal racism is the reductio ad absurdum of more than 100 years of Zionism, an aggressive nationalism born out of the marriage of 19th century European colonialism with orthodox Biblical claims to the land. The patina of idealism and morality that characterized Israel at its founding is stripped away. We are brought low by an irresponsible, crude, reckless bully who given half the chance will wreak great damage wherever he is allowed to hold sway.
DonW
This man makes Ahmadinejad look like Mother Theresa.
I don't like Ahmadinejad; but, to his credit, he has said Iran would NOT attack Israel, in contrast with constant Israeli threats against Iran.
Behnam
far be it for me to "defend" Jörg Haider, but I really cannot take these comparisons seriously anymore...
For the US audience, the far-right aspect of Haider was regularly described as "an Austrian Buchanan"..
foreign-policy-wise even your Buchanan sounds relatively sane compared to Bush, Clinton, Obama etc. - let alone to someone like Lieberman
It's easy to draw an obvious (and ironic) connection to Nazism.
Absolutely disgusting. I'm so shocked at the kind of person Lieberman chooses to be. I have no words for how appalled I am.
Lieberman scares me. He is a dangerous man. Nothing is too evil when it comes to protecting Israel against anything and everything, even imaginary enemies.
What was once a lunatic state who bombed its two concentration camps with wild abandon and implemented policy after policy of collective punishment against the Palestinian people is now poised to mutate into a more gruesome form of its former self.
I can hardly wait to see which international laws they will violate next!
Perhaps Israel could start a Human Despair Day in honor of its new far-right government.
Most human beings, not utterly savage, reject Israeli solutions: hate upon hate and war ad infinitum.
I don't envy your decision to take myopic cranks like Leiberman and Bibi seriously, Professor Cole.
It's all hot air. Israel is a bigger threat to itself and the Palestinians and Lebanese than any other nation.
The thought of Avigdor Lieberman as Israels foreign minister is truly horrible but Gideon Levy might be right when he wrote:
Netanyahu's election will free Israel from the burden of deception: If he can establish a right-wing government, the veil will be lifted and the nation's true face revealed to its citizens and the rest of the world, including Arab countries.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1061736.html
With the Gaza massacres in recent memory and an extreme far right nationalist like Lieberman as the face of Israeli foreign policy, hopefully that veil of lies and propaganda will be lifted even faster
Israeli politics has apparently devolved into the realm of the preposterous, projecting a menacing yet anxious masculinity ~ not unlike the decadent, decaying reign of Saddam Hussein and his phantom threats of "Weapons of Mass Destruction".
Under the reality of historical scrutiny we observe the Israelis sending their mighty forces northward to confront Hezbollah, only to see their tanks and APC turtles split open like tin cans by irregulars running around with newfangled yet potent hand-held RPG's. Then they bomb the bejesus out of Palestinian Ghettos (within their own borders!) and, while succeeding in rubble-izing the place and causing great misery ~ among peoples quite literally armed only with rifles, rocks & slings ~ in the end the Israelis failed to stop a fusillade of largely symbolic fireworks being launched at them by an "opposing Army" of angry teenagers.
While IRAQ demotes our finest assault troops to, what ~ security guards and boot-camp drill sergeants? And we chase bandits in the hills of NW Pakistan (note that by giving bin Laden the honor of fighting our finest, by gving Usama the narrative of "Global War" that he so desperatley wanted ~ we have succeeded only in degrading ourselves ~ becoming the unlawful combatants label with which we brand our opponents)...
...angry blowhards such as Avigdor Lieberman put on a bravado face but the reality of the Israeli Defense Force's recent actions reveals yet again that great soldiers are not merely executioners. Knowing this, if you were living in ISRAEL today ~ you, too might succumb to rightwing fear-mongering: Forget offense, "wiping Muslim countries off the map." If the Israelis were actually attacked, could they even defend themselves?
Juan,
I don't think your comparison of Ahmadinejad and Lieberman is accurate.
Ahamdinejad, IMHO, can be best compared to President Reagan (economic and foreign policy). Repeatedly, Regan proclaimed Soviet Union as evil, and predicted its demise. Ahmadinejad also sees Zionism as increasingly corrupt and in need of militaristic adventures. He is not alone to see that this trend can't continue indefinitely.
Lieberman on the other hand seems to me to be the Zionist version of Saddam Hussein. Interestingly Saddam too grow up as bully and as leader of Iraq was continuously in search of conflicts to keep his regime afloat.
You've just insulted all Moldovan night club bouncers. Was that wise? :-)
I am so sorry for all the Israeli people with common sense. Them must feel so bad and ashamed now.
Wikipedia has an entry about his conviction for assault on a 12 year old boy who bullied his son. Hot headed? Israel scraping the barrel? The answer to both these questions is yes.
It is incredibly sad to see a people, that has been persecuted and oppressed for millenia, chooses to become its oppressors and uses the same mechanisms of oppression such as state terror, apartheid and economic starvation, just to name a few.
Spouting hate and disdain by a foreign minister will be of no help to solving the problems in the powder keg region of the "Holy Land". It seems nothing is holy to the people running the show.
I am very concerned, yet it seems we will need nothing short of a miracle to prevent further blood shed and biblical injustice.
Tomas
Perhaps this has already been mentioned, but one shocking hypocrisy is that the 3 boilerplate conditions for negotiating with Hamas are that it has to (1) renounce terrorism, (2) recognize Israel and (3) agree to abide by all former agreements.
By saying the Annapolis agreements have no validity, Lieberman seems to have explicitly and obviously broken (3). But when Israel does it, suddenly it's not a red line anymore.
Of course a very good case could be made that Israel also breaks (1) and what should be the equivalent of (2), recognizing the right to exist of a Palestinian state. But there people will always quibble (especially about terrorism). This violation seems beyond doubt.
Michael
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