[News] Lieberman Steps Out of the Shadows

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

October 25, 2006


Lieberman Steps Out of the Shadows


Israel's Minister of Strategic Threats

By JONATHAN COOK

The furore that briefly flared this week at the decision of Israel's 
Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, to invite Avigdor Lieberman and his 
Yisrael Beiteinu party into the government coalition is revealing, 
but not in quite the way many observers assume.

Lieberman, a Russian immigrant, is every bit the populist and racist 
politician he is portrayed as being. Like many of his fellow 
politicians, he harbours a strong desire to see the Palestinians of 
the occupied territories expelled, ideally to neighbouring Arab 
states or Europe. Lieberman, however, is more outspoken than most in 
publicly advocating for this position.

Where he is seen as overstepping the mark is in arguing that the 
state should strip up to a quarter of a million Palestinians living 
inside Israel of their citizenship and seal them and their homes into 
the Palestinian ghettoes being created inside the West Bank 
(presumably in preparation for the moment when they will all be 
expelled to Jordan). He believes any remaining Arab citizens should 
be required to sign a loyalty oath to Israel as a "Jewish and 
democratic state" -- loyalty to a democratic state alone will not 
suffice. Any who refuse will be physically expelled from Israel.

And, as a coup de grace, he has recently demanded the execution for 
treason of any Arab parliamentarian who talks to the Palestinian 
leadership in the occupied territories or commemorates Nakba Day, 
which marks the expulsion and permanent dispossession of the 
Palestinian people in 1948. That would include every elected 
representative of Israel's Arab population.

These are Lieberman's official positions. Apparently unofficially he 
wants even worse measures taken against Palestinians, both inside 
Israel and in the occupied territories. In May 2004, for example, he 
told a crowd of his supporters, in Russian, that 90 per cent of the 
country's Arab citizens should be expelled. "They have no place here. 
They can take their bundles and get lost." His speech could have had 
second billing with one by Adolf Hitler at a Nuremberg Rally.

Despite Lieberman's well-known political platform, Olmert has been 
courting him ever since Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) upset 
the expected three-way struggle between Olmert's Kadima party, Labor 
and Likud in the March elections. Lieberman romped home with 11 seats 
in the Knesset, making his party a sparring partner of both Likud and 
the popular religious fundamentalist party Shas.

According to reports in the Israeli media, Lieberman has not joined 
the coalition until now because he has been playing hard to get, 
making increasing demands of Olmert before agreeing to sign up for 
the government. His hand has grown stronger too: according to opinion 
polls, he is now the most popular politician in Israel after Binyamin 
Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party.

In the newly established post of Minister for Strategic Threats, 
Lieberman -- the avowed Arab hater -- will shape Israel's response to 
Iran, leading the chorus threats being made by Israel that the 
country is only a hair's 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745325556/counterpunchmaga>
[]
breadth from dropping bombs, possibly nuclear warheads, on Tehran. 
After that, he will presumably help the government decide what other 
"strategic threats" it faces.

While Olmert enthuses over Lieberman, most in the Labor party seem 
quietly resigned to his inclusion. Labor's elder statesman and former 
leader, Shimon Peres, says he has no objections, so long as Lieberman 
does not challenge the core policies agreed by Kadima and Labor. 
This, of course, is precisely what Lieberman is doing -- it was the 
price of the bargain he struck with Olmert. Lieberman wants no peace 
overtures to the Palestinians, and favours the hardline neoliberal 
economic policies pursued by Kadima.

On Wednesday the Labor leader Amir Peretz, a supposed socialist and 
former head of the Israeli trade union movement, accepted Lieberman's 
entry to the coalition, as Olmert surely knew he would. In typical 
Labor style, Peretz bought off his conscience by insisting on a 
package of modest benefits for Arab citizens, the same Arab citizens 
Lieberman wants expelled. The last time the government made a similar 
promise to its Arab minority back in late 2001 -- when the prime 
minister of the day, Ehud Barak, needed their votes -- the $4 million 
pledge was broken immediately after the election.

So why are Israel's politicians, of the left and right, so 
comfortable sitting with Lieberman, the leader of Israel's only 
unquestionably fascist party? Because, in truth, Lieberman is not the 
maverick politician of popular imagination, even if he is every bit 
the racist -- a Jewish Jorg Haider or Jean Marie Le Pen.

In reality, Lieberman is entirely a creature of the Israeli political 
establishment, his policies sinister reflections of the principles 
and ideas he learnt in the inner sanctums of the Likud party, a young 
hopeful immigrant rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ariel Sharon, 
Binyamin Netanyahu and, of course, Ehud Olmert.

 From their political infancy, the latter three were schooled in the 
minor arts of Israeli diplomacy: feel free to speak plainly in the 
womb of the party; speak firmly but cautiously in Hebrew to other 
Israelis; and speak in another tongue entirely when using English, 
the language of the goyim, the non-Jews.

But Lieberman, who arrived in Israel as a 21-year-old, was not around 
for those lessons. He imbibed nothing of the principles of "hasbara", 
the "advocacy for Israel" industry that has its unpaid battalions of 
propagandists regularly assaulting the phone lines and email inboxes 
of the Western media. He tells it exactly as he sees it, even if 
mostly in Russian.

Inside the Likud party, his political training ground, that hardly 
mattered. He rapidly rose through the ranks to become 
director-general of Likud from 1993-96 and soon afterwards to head 
the office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For many years he 
was the darling of the Likud, a party that today exists in two 
halves: its original incarnation, once again led by Netanyahu; and 
the renovated, sleeker model, Kadima, founded by Sharon.

But it was in breaking from Likud and founding his own party, Yisrael 
Beiteinu, in 1999 that Lieberman finally found his voice outside the 
Likud's smoke-filled rooms. The audience for his message was as 
untutored in the deceits of Israeli politicking as Lieberman himself.

Lieberman immigrated to Israel from Moldova in 1978, leading the 
vanguard of a wave of immigration from Russia and its satellite 
states that reached a peak in the early 1990s as the Soviet empire 
broke up. By the time most Russian speakers began pouring into 
Israel, Lieberman was already well esconced in the Israeli political system.

Yisrael Beiteinu's openly racist agenda spoke to the darkest 
instincts of the one million newly arrived Russian speakers.

Many of them poor and struggling to adapt to Israeli culture, they 
live far from the prosperous centre of the country in their own 
neglected ghettos, Little Moscows, where the signs and street 
language are more than a decade later still in Russian. They feel 
little affinity for the Jewish state -- apart from a loathing for 
everything Arab.

The state has found it easy to manipulate these immigrants' emotions. 
They have little understanding of the historic reasons for Israel's 
conflict with the Palestinians, and like other Israelis learn almost 
nothing more at school. With no context for appreciating why the 
Palestinians might carry out suicide attacks, Russian speakers assume 
the Palestinians are simply the hate-filled barbarians described to 
them by their politicians.

When young Russian men do their three years of active duty in the 
occupied territories, all these prejudicies are confirmed. Now one of 
the largest blocs of Israel's citizen army, the Russians are assigned 
some of the toughest spots in the West Bank and Gaza, often their 
first experience of meeting "Arabs".

When they return home, they find it hard to make sense of Israeli 
officialdom's lip service in distinguishing between Arab citizens, 
who have some rights in the Jewish state, and the "Arabs" of the 
occupied territories, who have none. Many Russian speakers wonder why 
Israel does not simply kill or expel the lot of them.

And this is where Lieberman steps in. Because usefully this is 
exactly what he not only believes but also openly declares. Lieberman 
can tap the support of nearly a million voters, a huge reservoir of 
support for any prime ministerial hopeful trying to assemble the 
coalition needed to form a government under the fractious Israeli 
political system.

Neither Olmert nor Netanyahu can afford to say what is really on 
their minds: that they want to cleanse the region of as many 
Palestinians as they can manage -- most certainly those in the 
occupied territories, and later the even bigger nuisance of the ones 
who have citizenship and undermine Israel's Jewishness.

But instead they can let a Lieberman, the charismatic leader of a 
popular party who does dare to say these things, join the government 
with minimal damage to their own reputations.

They can also let him use the platform provided by a cabinet position 
to shape a new coarser political language in which ideas of expulsion 
and transfer become ever more mainstream. Until one day the policies 
Lieberman advocates, reflections of the values he imbibed during his 
long years spent in Likud, become acceptable enough that a Prime 
Minister -- Olmert or Netanyahu or Lieberman himself -- will be able 
to put them in the government's programme.

Instead of using words like "disengagement", "convergence" or 
"realignment", Israel's politicians of the near future may simply 
call for the expulsion of Arabs, all Arabs.

Even now they do little to conceal the fact that such thoughts are 
uppermost in their minds. Netanyahu, currently Israel's most popular 
politician and leader of the opposition, has repeatedly called the 
1.2 million Arab citizens of the country a "demographic timebomb". 
Back in 2002, for example, he told an audience of policymakers: "If 
there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli 
Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens We therefore need a policy 
that will first of all guarantee a Jewish majority."

Unlike Lieberman, Netanyahu never spells out what policies he is 
advocating. But most Israelis understand that in practice, if he felt 
free to speak his mind, his platform would not look much different 
from Yisrael Beiteinu's.

Olmert too uses code words readily understood by his Israeli 
audiences. In late 2004, in an interview with the Haaretz newspaper, 
he said: "There is no doubt in my mind that very soon the government 
of Israel is going to have to address the demographic issue with the 
utmost seriousness and resolve. This issue above all others will 
dictate the solution that we must adopt." He added that he feared the 
Palestinians would soon be a majority in the area comprising both the 
occupied territories and Israel, and that then they could launch a 
"dangerous" struggle for "one-man-one-vote" similar to the one 
against apartheid in South Africa. He concluded: "For us, it would 
mean the end of the Jewish state."

What "solution" was Olmert referring to? Israelis know only too well. 
Every year since 2000 Olmert, Netanyahu, Peres and other senior 
policymakers have been meeting at the Herzliya conference, near Tel 
Aviv, to draw up ideas about how to deal with the demographic threat: 
the rapidly approaching moment when the Palestinians, either those 
with Israeli citizenship or the non-citizens living under military 
occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, will outnumber Jews.

The solutions they have proposed have been similar to Lieberman's. 
Both the disengagement from Gaza and the planned limited withdrawals 
from the West Bank came out of Herzliya. But so did a range of 
measures to deal with the country's Arab citizens: land swaps to lose 
areas of Israel densely populated with Arabs in return for the 
settlements in the West Bank; loyalty oaths as a condition of 
citizenship; stripping the Arab population of their right to vote; 
and forcing all political parties to subscribe to Zionist ideals.

These are not fanciful ideas; they are now firmly in the mainstream. 
Israel already has legislation requiring all parties running for the 
Knesset to support Israel remaining a "Jewish and democratic state". 
Technically, the only non-Zionist parties -- two Arab parties and the 
small joint Jewish and Arab Communist party -- could quite legally be 
disqualified from all general elections under the current 
legislation. They expect that at some point in the near future they 
will be too.

The two previous prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, both 
secretly favoured land swaps in which large numbers of Arab citizens 
would be removed from the Jewish state. Barak proposed such a scheme 
at Camp David in the summer of 2000, as several participants later 
confirmed. And in February 2004 Sharon floated the same idea during 
an interview in the Maariv newspaper. When it caused a storm, he 
backtracked, but investigations by the paper revealed that he had 
been formulating a land swap for some time with his advisers and had 
even consulted the then Labor leader and his foreign minister, Shimon 
Peres, on its feasibility.

At the top of Lieberman's list of demands before agreeing to enter 
Olmert's coalition are major changes to Israel's constitution, 
including the introduction of a presidential system to replace the 
current parliamentary system. Israel already has a President, 
currently Moshe Katsav, who is facing a string of rape and sexual 
harassment allegations, but the post is entirely symbolic.

Lieberman wants a president who has the authority to make major 
legislative changes, even constitutional ones, without having to make 
the backroom compromises to keep together the coalition governments 
that characterise Israel's current political system. The president 
Lieberman has in mind would be more on the lines of an autocratic ruler.

Olmert is apparently sympathetic to Lieberman's plans to change the 
political system. It is not difficult to understand why.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. 
He is the author of 
"<http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=224729>Blood and 
Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published 
by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the 
University of Michigan Press. His website is 
<http://www.jkcook.net/>www.jkcook.net


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