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| Vladimir Putin http://simpsons.wikia.com/ |
JERUSALEM — Emboldened by the Republican sweep of last week’s American elections, right-wing members of the Israeli government have called anew for the abandonment of a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. Because, fuck Muslims, am I right?
“The combination of changes in the United States, in Europe and in the region provide Israel with a unique opportunity to reset and rethink everything,” Naftali Bennett, Israel’s education minister and the leader of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party, told a gathering of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem on Monday. “Mr. Trump’s victory has clearly shown us that on the path forward we will be unencumbered by bothersome requirements of human decency towards our Muslim neighbors.”
Mr. Bennett, who advocates annexing 60 percent of the occupied West Bank to Israel, exulted on the morning after Donald J. Trump’s victory: “The era of a Palestinian state – and along with it the hopes and dreams of the occupied territories’ 4 million people – is over.”
Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and other rightist politicians jumped to make hay of the change.
Aryeh Deri, the interior minister, who is ultra-Orthodox, hailed Mr. Trump’s victory as a miracle, asserting it would lessen the influence of liberal, non-Orthodox streams of Judaism popular in America. He unreservedly and somehow unironically expressed enthusiasm for the emerging political climate in which members of an entire religion can be disenfranchised, dispossessed, and forcibly displaced while the international community looks the other way. He added, “We must truly be in Messianic times when everything will turn out favorably for the people of Israel. I can’t see how this could possibly go badly for the Jews.”
Elsewhere, other tyrannical foreign leaders welcomed the new American disregard for historically oppressed minorities. Emails to Vladimir Putin went unanswered as he was taking part in the Russian Bear-Baiting and Glass-Eating Championships, but Putin mini-me Dmitry Medvedev expressed enthusiasm for an international political climate that would allow them to reach previously unexplored depths of darkness in the human soul in combating the Chechen insurgency. “We could probably nuke them and nobody would bat an eye anymore” he said.
In China, Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping marvelled at how open Trump had been in his disdain for minority groups, and how large swaths of the American electorate ate it up.
“We go to great lengths to hide from the world the horrible things we do to our troublesome Muslims” he said, referring to the Uyghurs in eastern China. “Jailing dissidents, blocking the internet – it’s a great drain on resources. We don’t even have Facebook!” Xi continued, “maybe now we can stop doing all that and just destroy them openly.”
Back in Israel on Sunday, a ministerial committee of rightists within the Likud party and the governing coalition approved a contentious bill to retroactively legalize illegal settlement on privately owned Palestinian land. Asked what would be done with the rightful inhabitants of the land, a spokesperson who spoke on the condition of anonymity suggested that they could perhaps be sent to remote parcels of land where they could be concentrated together.
Mr. Netanyahu warmly welcomed Mr. Trump’s victory, calling him “a true friend” of Israel. But Mr. Netanyahu has also since instructed his ministers and legislators to be discreet, suggesting “we don’t want to let the cat out of the bag too quickly.”
Israeli analysts point out that the Trump campaign has spread contradictory messages. While many here assume that he will have more pressing priorities than the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that he would like to seal an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, calling it the “ultimate deal” – a vast improvement on the original working title of the “final solution”, which Mr. Trump was somehow unaware was impolitic.
With Mr. Trump on board, Mr. Netanyahu may be forced to act on the settlements. Amit Segal, a political commentator for Israel’s popular Channel 2 News, said that during the tenures of Presidents Clinton and Obama, Mr. Netanyahu could “disguise his worldview which allowed for the possibility that Arabs might be treated as human beings.” The Obama administration’s sharp condemnation of all settlement activity gave Mr. Netanyahu “the ultimate excuse” for not building with abandon on stolen land in the West Bank, Mr. Segal said in an interview, adding, “I am not sure that the right wing, with its appetite, will be prepared to suffer another few years of not oppressing and dispossessing people who happen to be of a different faith from them.”
Asked what Mr. Netanyahu would probably be rooting for, Israelis who generally reflect the prime minister’s thinking said he was unlikely to forswear the two-state solution.
“Israel has its own interest in reaching a negotiated solution with its neighbors,” said Dore Gold, a longtime Netanyahu adviser. “This is not a function of pressure or arm-twisting. Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it clear that this is his goal” noted Gold, adding that it may not be wise to rejoice at America’s apparent abandonment of the internationalist principles to which his nation owes its very existence.
But Mr. Gold suggested that a Trump administration was likely to roll back the demand that Israel withdraw to the 1967 lines and support borders that are more accommodating to Israel. “Trump’s policy paper – which was scrawled on the back of a napkin while waiting for a sandwich at a deli in Iowa – spoke about Israel having defensible borders, which are clearly different from the 1967 lines,” he said, clarifying that by “defensible” he meant militarily, not morally.
Gilead Sher, an Israeli former peace negotiator under the left-leaning governments of Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, noted that although most of the Israeli governments over the past four decades had been right-wing, “never has one of them annexed one square inch of the West Bank.” “Mr. Trump’s complete ignorance of history, foreign policy, Arab-Israeli relations, and fifth grade math will provide the Israeli right with the perfect opportunity to change all of that.”
Mr. Sher, now a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, is also co-chairman of Blue White Future, an Israeli group advocating a two-state solution, by unilateral means if necessary. Of the rejoicing on the Israeli right, he said, “Most joyful moments are provisional and temporary. You’d think we of all people would know that.”
Mr. Trump’s spokesman and newly appointed chief strategist and senior counsellor Steve Bannon, who went from looney fringe voice of white supremacists and neo Nazis to one of the most influential posts in global politics with unsettling speed, voiced enthusiasm for the Israeli right’s plans.
“We fully support Israel’s right to defend itself and its borders. Annexing part or all of the occupied territories is consistent with our understanding of Israel’s security needs” he said, adding with a chuckle, “besides, they’re going to need the space when we send the rest of them back there.”
* Adapted from The New York Times Israel's right, cheering Donald Trump's win, renews calls to abandon two-state solution by Isabel Kirshner, November 14th, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/world/middleeast/israel-netanyahu-trump-palestinian-settlements.html?ref=world&_r=1
**This post is a satirical rewrite of the original article. Most of the text is directly from the article. Some of the quotes and attributions I made up myself. Try to guess which ones! I bet you won't get them all. That's how fucked up all of this is.
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