Uri
Avnery
November
12, 2011
“YOU are
Fed Up?”
“YOU
CAN lie to all of the people some of the time, and to some of the people all of
the time, but you cannot lie to all of the people all of the time.”
This
slightly altered quotation from Abraham Lincoln has yet to be absorbed by
Binyamin Netanyahu. He thinks it doesn't apply to him. Actually, that is the
core of his entire political career.
This
week, he was given a very instructive lesson. After being treated to dozens of
cordial encounters between Netanyahu and Nicholas Sarkozy, Israeli TV viewers
got a glimpse of reality. It came in the form of an exchange of views between
the presidents of the US and of France.
Sarkozy:
“I cannot stand him (Netanyahu). He is a liar!”
Obama: "YOU are fed up with him?
I have to deal with him every day!"
That came after it was leaked that
Angela Merkel, the German prime minister, told her cabinet that “every word
that leaves Netanyahu’s mouth is a lie.”
Which makes it more or less unanimous.
BEFORE PROCEEDING, I must say
something about the media angle of this affair.
The dialogue was broadcast live to a
group of senior French media people, because somebody forgot to turn the
microphone off. A piece of luck of the kind that journalists dream about.
Yet not one of the journalists in the
hall published a word about it. They kept it to themselves and only told it to
their colleagues, who told it to their friends, one of whom told it to a
blogger, who published it.
Why? Because the senior journalists
who were present are friends and confidants of the people in power. That’s how
they get their scoops. The price is suppressing any news that might hurt or
embarrass their sponsors. This means in practice that they become lackeys of
the people in power – betraying their elementary democratic duty as servants of
the public.
I know this from experience. As an
editor of a news magazine, I saw it as my duty (and pleasure) to break these
conspiracies of silence. Actually, many of our best scoops were given to us by
colleagues from other publications who could not use them themselves for the
same reason.
Luckily, with the internet now
everywhere, it has become almost impossible to suppress news. Blessed be the
online Gods.
A FEW weeks after Yitzhak Rabin was
elected Prime Minister (for the second time) in 1992, I met Yasser Arafat in
Tunis.
He was, of course, curious about the
personality of the newly elected Israeli leader. Knowing that I was meeting him
from time to time, he asked what I thought of him.
“He is an honest man,” I replied, and
then added: “as much as a politician can be.”
Arafat burst out laughing, and so did
everybody in the room, including Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Abed Rabbo.
Ever
since Sir Henry Wotton said, some four centuries ago, that “an ambassador is an
honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” it is generally
assumed that diplomats and politicians may be lying, and not only abroad. Some
do so only when necessary, some do it often, some, like Netanyahu, do it as a
rule.
In spite of the general assumption of
mendacity, it is not good for a leader to be branded as a habitual liar. When
leaders meet personally, in private and face to face, they are supposed to tell
each other the truth, even if not necessarily the whole truth. Some personal
trust is of great advantage. If a leader loses it, he loses a precious asset.
Winston Churchill said of one of his
predecessors, Stanley Baldwin, that (quoting from memory) “the Right Honorable
Gentleman sometimes stumbles upon the truth, but he always hurries on as if
nothing has happened.” One of our ministers said about Ariel Sharon that he
sometimes tells the truth by mistake. People asked how you could tell when
Richard Nixon was lying: “Easy: his lips are moving”.
Rabin was basically an honest man. He
hated lying and avoided it as much as he could. Basically he remained a
military man and never became a real politician.
LAST WEDNESDAY was the 16th
anniversary of his assassination, according to the Hebrew calendar.
The event was marked in Israeli
schools by speeches and special lessons.
What these citizens of tomorrow learned was that it is very bad to
murder a prime minister. And that, more or less, was that.
Not a word about why he was killed.
Certainly nothing about the community the assassin belonged to, or what
campaign of hatred and incitement led to the murder.
The Ministry of Education is now
firmly in the hands of a Likud minister, and one of the most extreme. But the
trend is not confined to the education system.
In Israel it is practically impossible
to obtain a picture of Rabin shaking the hand of Arafat. Rabin and King
Hussein? As many post cards as you might wish. But Rabin’s peace with Jordan
was an unimportant matter, like the US peace with Canada. The Oslo agreement,
however, was a historic watershed.
Only people branded as “extreme
leftists” – one of the worst insults these days – dare to raise the obvious
questions about the assassination: Who? Why?
There is tacit agreement that the only
person responsible was the actual assassin: Yigal Amir, the son of Yemenite
Jews, a former settler and a student of a religious university.
Would he have acted without the
blessing of one or more rabbis? Most certainly not.
Amir was led to do what he did by
months of intense incitement. An unprecedented campaign of hatred dominated the
public sphere. Posters showed Rabin in the uniform of an SS officer. Religious
groups publicly condemned him to death in medieval ceremonies. Demonstrators in
front of his private home shouted: “With blood and fire / we shall remove
Rabin!”
In the most (in)famous demonstration,
in the center of Jerusalem, a coffin marked “Rabin” was paraded around, while
Netanyahu looked on from a balcony, in the company of other rightist leaders.
And most tellingly: not a single
important right-wing or religious voice was raised against this murderous
campaign.
By general tacit agreement, nothing of
all this was mentioned this week. Why? Because it would not be nice. It would
“split the nation”. Honorable citizens do not do this kind of thing.
Rabin himself cannot be acquitted of
all blame. After the incredibly courageous act of recognizing the PLO (and
thereby the Palestinian people) and shaking hands with Arafat, he did not rush
forward to create an irreversible historic fact of peace, but hesitated,
dithered, held back and allowed the forces of war and racism to regroup and
counter-attack.
When the Kiryat Arba settler Baruch
Goldstein carried out his massacre in the “Cave of Machpela”, Rabin had a
golden opportunity to clear out the nest of fascist settlers in Hebron. He
shrank back from taking on the settlers. The settlers did not shrink back from
killing him.
WHAT HAPPENED next? This week a very
revealing document was leaked.
It appears that on the day of the
assassination, Netanyahu spoke with the American ambassador (and Zionist Jew)
Martin Indyk. Netanyahu, remembering his part in the incitement, was obviously
in panic. He confided to the ambassador that if elections were to take place
immediately, the entire Israeli right-wing would be wiped out.
But Shimon Peres, the new Prime
Minister, did not call immediate elections, though several people (including
myself) publicly urged him to do so. Netanyahu’s assessment was quite correct –
the country was outraged, the right-wing was generally blamed for the
assassination, and if elections had taken place, the Right would have been
marginalized for many many years. The entire history of Israel would have taken
a different turn.
Why did Peres refuse to do so? Because
he hated Rabin. He did not want to be elected as the “executor of Rabin’s
testament”, but on his own merits. Unfortunately, the public did not have the
same high opinion of these “merits”.
During the next few months, Peres
committed every conceivable (and inconceivable) mistake: he approved the killing of a major Hamas
militant which led to a flood of deadly suicide bombings all over the country.
He attacked Lebanon, which led to the Kafr Kana massacre, and had to withdraw
ignominiously. And then he called premature elections after all. In his
election campaign, Rabin was not even mentioned. Thus Peres managed to be
(narrowly) defeated by Netanyahu.
I once wrote that Peres suffered his
most grievous insult just a few minutes before the assassination. Amir was
waiting at the foot of the stairs from the tribune, his pistol ready. Peres
came down the steps, and the assassin let him pass, like a fisherman
contemptuously throwing a small specimen back into the sea. He was waiting for
Rabin.
The rest is history.
