Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is beginning to sweat
by Neve Gordon
Notwithstanding the agreement between President Barack Obama and Netanyahu on issues such as the recognition of Israel
as a Jewish state and the insistence that the Palestinians renounce violence, there are currently points of serious
contention between the two leaders. These include Obama's position that the two-state solution is the only way to
resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his demand that Israel stop building settlements and his intimation that all
the settlements are illegal. Other points of strife include Obama's call for regional nuclear non-proliferation (which,
in effect, assumes that Israel's nuclear capacity will be part of the negotiations with Iran), his recognition of the
plight of Palestinians, including the refugees, and his claim that Hamas is a legitimate rather than a terrorist
organization.
So far Obama's challenges to Israel have been theoretical, and the only substantive demand that Washington has made
involves the 100 or so Jewish outposts in the West Bank. Reiterating President Bush's directive, Obama recently asked
Netanyahu to begin dismantling the outposts.
Legally the outposts are just like the 121 settlements (namely, they are all illegal), only the outposts were built
following the 1993 Oslo accords, and, as opposed to the settlements, which are now home to close to half a million Jews
or about 7 percent of Israel's citizenry, almost all the outposts are extremely sparsely populated with less than a
dozen people in each one.
Netanyahu did not refuse, but instead of carrying out the job, he decided to put on a show.
Last week, the government sent troops to dismantle two outposts. The television networks were invited to cover the
event, and that evening viewers watched how a group of settlers struggled against the most powerful military in the
Middle East. Within hours of the news broadcasts, the settlers had already rebuilt the outposts, and thus today we are,
once again, back to square one.
The perceptive viewer understands that the government and the settlers are staging the events, using the media to
broadcast them to the world. The images of lawless fundamentalists fighting the military convey a clear message to the
audience at home: if Netanyahu dares to dismantle the outposts, the settlers will not only topple his government, but
there will be blood. More specifically, the not-so-latent inference is that if Netanyahu goes ahead with Washington's
directive, he will be responsible for a civil war.
While all of the major news networks provided a similar narrative, Channel Two, the most popular news provider,
dedicated 14 minutes of prime time to the issue. In the segment, a reporter is shown interviewing a Jewish settler named
Araleh from Karnei Shomron in the West Bank about the dismantlement of Jewish outposts. The two men are standing on a
mountain ridge overlooking Palestinian fields that had been set on fire. The settler asserts that, "This is the price
tag... People need to know that if they dismantle anything in Judea and Samaria, there is a price." He then looks at the
horizon and asks, "Do you see all these mountains?" and immediately responds, "they are all ours." When the reporter
inquires what the settlers will do if a nearby outpost is dismantled, Araleh exclaims that they (the government) will
not destroy it, and then adds "they might destroy a little shack in the outpost to send pictures to the nigger in the
United States."
The crux of the matter is that this pathetic racist settler is right: the images of troops dismantling a few outposts
and the forceful resistance are all part of a well choreographed spectacle that is being produced specifically for
Washington. Otherwise why remove only two outposts at a time instead of forty at once and getting the job done? And why
invite the networks to cover the events and not to dismantle the outposts by surprise in the early morning hours when
the settlers are not ready?
The answer is straightforward: Netanyahu wants Obama to think that Israel will end up in a civil war if the White House
stands firm.
The question now is whether Obama will back off or whether he will he have the courage to make Netanyahu dismantle both
the outposts and the settlements. If Obama hesitates Israel will become a full blown Apartheid regime, while if he
remains bold he will probably be remembered as the President who helped save Israel from itself. To do so he will have
to make Netanyahu sweat much more.
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Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and is the author of Israel's Occupation (University of
California Press, 2008). Visit his homepage at www.israelsoccupation.info