Netanyahu: We Will Rule Over Everything and Live by Sword Forever

Haaretz reports a breathtaking level of candor from Bibi Netanyahu during a session of the Knesset foreign affairs and security committee.  Though there is no transcript of his exact remarks (alas), MKs relayed his comments to Barak Ravid, who conveyed them to readers.  Israel is a nation beset by political climate change much more extreme than what’s besetting our planet.  And as the Israeli climate heats up, far-right politicians like Bibi can reveal beliefs they previously felt they should conceal.

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I have been writing for years that Israel is a garrison state on a perpetual war footing with all the horrors that such a thing implies.  Bibi has now confirmed my worst fears: he is prepared to wage such a war for Israeli existence (as he sees it) forever:

I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword — yes.”

Bibi conveniently omitted the closing phrase in this famous saying: “die by the sword.”  Israelis of course are dying in the current intifada.  Ten over the past two weeks.  Not by the sword, but by the knife and even sometimes at the hands of fellow Jews who mistake them for “Arab.”  Bibi has caused the death of hundreds of Israelis during his terms in office.  But he won’t pay the price because he manages to deflect his constituents from the truth.

The question is how long will the average Israeli be willing to live in a state of permanent war?  How many of their children are they willing to feed into the maw of the machine before they decide to leave?  How long before Israel is left with those too poor or too ideologically fervent to leave: a state of settlers, Arabs, Mizrahim, and Haredim?

Bibi Tells Israelis One Thing in Hebrew and Foreigners the Opposite in English

Israel’s far right used to whine regularly that Arafat would tell his audience one thing and his foreign audience something entirely different.  They don’t need to complain in this regard about Abbas, because he’s a spineless wimp both in a domestic and international context.

Ironically, Bibi does precisely what he accused Arafat of doing.  He offers Israelis, especially those from his own constituency, nostrums about Palestinian perfidy and Israeli invincibility and whispers pearls of peace to the outside.  A desperate Bibi cried he would never accept a Palestinian state on election day.  After the ensuing uproar, he told the U.S. and rest of the world that of course he supports a two state solution.  An old Yiddishism I remember from the movie, Hester Street (1975), is: “You can’t piss on my back and tell me it’s rain.”  That’s Bibi, pissing on the world and telling them it’s mountain spring water.

Here’s what he told the Knesset committee:

…Netanyahu said…that although he doesn’t want a binational state, “at this time we need to control all of the territory for the foreseeable future.”

When he says “foreseeable future” he means forever.  Bibi apparently has the eyes of an eagle and can see forever into the Zionist future.  So let no one fool the Palestinians into believing there’s a peace option and an Israeli partner.  There is none.  Israel will rule all of it from river to sea forever.  Unless, the world takes matters into its hands and stops this colossal land grab.

In Bibi’s ill-fated World Zionist Congress speech  in which he let Hitler off the hook for the Holocaust, he let loose with some additional lies his audience, no doubt, consumed with gusto.  Among them, was that the Palestinians have spread lies around the world about Israeli culpability for the current round of mass murder:

…Here’s the first big lie: Israel is trying to change the status quo on the Temple Mount. No, we’re not. We haven’t changed the status quo on the Temple Mount in years…We in no way deny the sacred sites or the rights or the free access for other denominations…

Uh actually, Mr. Prime Minister, you do.  In September, you decreed, as you always do during the Jewish High Holy Days (and other times as well) that no Muslim men under 50 could pray at the Haram al Sharif.  Then, when young Palestinians defied you and fortified Al Aqsa to withstand police assault, your Border Patrol went in with billy clubs swinging and broke down the doors of the sacred site while spewing tear gas through the air.

Bibi goes on to say that “only 12,000” Jews have visited the Temple Mount and “That hasn’t changed.” Actually, it has. Here is what Gil Erdan, said during an interview:

In an interview with the Israeli news portal Walla, Gil Erdan, the internal security minister, boasted that since he’d begun allowing ministers to visit Al-Aqsa the number of Muslims permitted had decreased and the number of Jews had increased six times.

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I’ll let you be the judge regarding Bibi’s chronic discrepancy between truth and lies.  Is it congenital?  Or does he not know better?  Or simply not care?

We didn’t have to wait long after the prime minister spouted these lies for one of his own cabinet members to contradict him.  Yesterday, Tzipi Hotovely, deputy foreign minister and one of the rising young stars of the Likud told Israel this:

“I think it’s the center of Israeli sovereignty, the capital of Israel, the holiest place for the Jewish people,” Likud lawmaker and Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said in an interview with the Knesset channel. “It’s my dream to see the Israeli flag flying on the Temple Mount.”

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Herzl dreamed of a Jewish homeland and Hotovely dreams of holy war.  How dreams change.  And no, this is not a case of someone being “off message.”  Hotovely is not an aberration.  She is not a loose cannon.  She is at the heart of the Likud.  She speaks the words Bibi may not.  But she knows this is what he would say if he could.  She knows she does his work as his surrogate.

The Facebook Intifada

Finally, a report from the Department of Zio-Oddities, those sterling folks at Shurat Ha-Din are at it again.  They’ve announced a class action lawsuit against Facebook for provoking the current intifada.  That’s right, we should now call it officially the Facebook Intifada.  Because those Arabs are too stupid to organize something like this on their own.  They need “Mufti Zuckerberg” to do it for them.

20,000 Israelis have joined the class.  They claim that Facebook permits Jew haters to call for the murder of Jews on its pages:

“Facebook’s refusal to remove the flood of extremist videos, statements and cartoons being posted by Palestinians is encouraging imminent violence and fanning the flames of the terrorist attacks that have overwhelmed Israel in the past month.”

There are almost too many ironies to mention about this claim.  But chief among them must be that Israeli Jews host literally hundreds, if not thousands of Facebook groups calling for, as but one example, the murder of Israeli Palestinian politicians like Haneen Zoabi.

Among the 20,000 participants in the suit, almost all have suffered no injury, usually the standard for such cases.  Rather, they believe they are “endangered” by the “incitement” that Facebook aids and abets.  I too feel endangered by a wannabe Jewish terrorist named Brian Thomas (and ‘partner in crime’ with David Lange) who asked some years ago on Twitter whether it was permissible under Jewish law to “excommunicate” me “by firearms.”  Twitter of course, found that such incitement to murder didn’t trespass on its Terms of Service.  Should I sue Twitter because I feel endangered?

Of course, Shurat Hadin hasn’t a hope in hell of winning anything from this suit.  Facebook has done nothing wrong.  In fact, is far too quick to take down pages of legitimate users, as I’ve noted here before.  But the Israeli NGO, noted for its intimate relationship with the Mossad, who helped launch it, is like the proverbial ambulance chasing lawyer.  Except in this instance, it’s not chasing ambulances and personal injury cases.  Instead, it’s chasing the chimera of anti-Semitism and Arab terror.  Where it can’t find a real injury it will invent one out of whole cloth.  This is the epitome of what’s known as lawfare: exploiting the law to score cheap political points.

Shurat HaDin may feel Facebook endangers the Jewish people, but that hasn’t stopped it from maintaining its own Facebook pages.  Hypocrisy runs deep among the hasbarafia.