The real Netanyahu

Uri Avnery

translated from Ma'ariv 24/Sep/98
 
"It is true that the Israeli Prime Minister's name is Netanyahu; however,
his first name is not Binyamin. It is Ben-Tzion." So I wrote a year ago
in an article which, for some reason, resonated particularly with
journalists abroad. Foreign correspondents phoned me urgently: How many
times a day does Binyamin speak with Ben-Tzion? How many times a week do
they meet face to face? How am I privy to the particulars of these
conversations? I chuckled and told myself: Oh well, journalists.
 
I did not think that the 88-year old professor has been coaching his
49-year old son in his every action. But the elder Netanyahu's influence
is far more critical: He is the one who has molded his son's entire
spiritual world. After all, throughout childhood and youth, Binyamin
absorbed the principles of his dominating father's beliefs, who also
selected Binyamin's reading booklist.
 
Binyamin is no intellectual. He is utterly devoid of any creative
thinking, beyond tactical matters. His whole world view, his concepts
and his philosophy have been absorbed from his father. Ben-Tzion
laid down the conceptual tracks upon which the Binyamin train runs. And
thus it is Ben-Tzion Netanyahu who, in effect, is running the country.
And that is a scary thought.
 
The isolated, alienated and embittered professor has not been seen in
public for years. Now he has broken his silence, and in conversations
with Uri Shavit, a respected yournalist in the Haaretz weekly
supplement), he has laid out his philosophy across eight large pages.
I suspect that most readers have not bothered to read this enormous
treatise, which is a shame. They would have begun to understand
Binyamin's acts, and most would have been shaken to their core.
 
There is a well-documented psychological syndrome: An individual
believes in a bizarre fundamental premise (for instance, "The world
is a cube") and proceeds to construct upon it an entire logical
structure. The more logical and perfect the structure, the
more severe the individual's psychological problem. The very
perfection is a symptom of the disease.
 
Ben-Tzion Netanyahu has a few fundamental premises: We live in a jungle.
All countries are predatory animals. The whole world hates the Jews. "The
Arab quest to annihilate the Jewish state has neither ceased nor
abated...if allowed, they will slaughter us to the last person." When
this happens, in Ben-Tzion's view, Europe will not even send ships to
rescue the survivors.
 
There is absolute gloom in this. It is not by chance that the professor
has devoted decades to the study of the Spanish Inquisition. He
perceives a succession of holocausts: The annihilation of Spanish
Jewish community by the Catholics, the annihilation of European
Jewry by the Nazis and the intended annihilation of the Israeli
Jews by the Arabs. "Without a shadow of a doubt," (Netanyahu Senior
never has a single doubt about anything) "someone like
Arafat...is motivated today as in the past, by the desire to destroy
our state". It is not a matter of Palestinians ("It is crystal clear
to me that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people at all")
but rather a matter of all Arabs, in fact, of all Moslems. The
latter are referred to in terms of "The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion": "Islam has always desired to subjugate the Western world".
Clearly, he must have never heard of the Christian West's striving to
subjugate the Moslem world, as well as the world at large. It is
peculiar that he has never heard of the Crusades.
 
In contrast, he regards the Catholics, who got the Moslems out of Spain,
following a continuous 800-year war, as a great example. It is true, they
did kill, torture and expel both Moslems and Jews, but that is not
important. He asks of us to follow their example and wage a bloody war
from generation to generation, for hundreds of years to come. He extols
the virtues of those Spanish mothers who would dispatch three sons to war
every year, and who rejoiced when two came back. Our war, though, will not
be limited to 800 years; In the professor's opinion, it will go on
forever.
 
One of the reasons he gives is that "there is a great propensity for
violence in the Arab society, one incapable of surviving without the rule
of a despot...the old mentality...the ancient Moslem tendencies...."
Were he to publish such commentary in any European university, he would
be branded racist and expelled forthwith. But, he states, "There is a
deep cultural contrast between us and the Arabs, because Zionism is at
its heart a western movement...having always constituted, in a
sense, as an outpost of the West in the East." The professor does
not mention a single word about Oriental Jews, such as
Maimonides or the poet Yehuda Halevi, who were completely assimilated
in that "despised" Arab-Moslem culture. Not to mention the
Oriental Jews who constitute half of Israel's Jewish population.
 
All these are nothing more than the classic concepts of the
right-wing Zionist "revisionist" party of 70 years ago. But
they carry very real implications: "The idea of land for peace is
bankrupt." On Oslo: "This trap, from which I am still uncertain how
to extricate ourselves...the prospect of a Palestinian state is a
nightmare to me." So what is one to do? "And here is where Binyamin
comes in to fulfill his most important function these days. The Oslo
agreement, which must inevitably lead to the creation of such a
Palestinian state, is leading us to the edge of the precipice. We
must extricate ourselves from this self-imposed trap without breaking
the agreements, in such a manner as to not appear to have been the
ones who have violated that which had been promised; and to achieve
this without leading to an open confrontation with the U.S. And most
important of all -- without losing any of our strategic advantages" -
meaning occupied territory.
 
But there are some difficulties: "The inherent weakness of the Jewish human
material"... "our nation is utterly blind"... "the deep hatred of the Left
wing for their ideological opponents." Hence, "the potential for a
catastrophe."
 
The voice is Ben-Tzion's; the hands are Binyamin's.
 
 
 
 
 
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