JERUSALEM POST REPORTS CLINTONS TO JOIN ISRAEL EXTREMIST LEADER IN TALKS AT WASHINGTON FORUM

UNDERNEWS
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
November 21, 2006
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JERUSALEM POST OCT 31 - [New Israeli deputy minister and apartheid advocate] Avigdor Lieberman is already set for his first trip abroad as a minister. He will travel to the United States on December 8 to take part in the prestigious Saban Forum at the Saban Center For Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Lieberman will speak about the future of the Middle East on a panel with Labor MK Ami Ayalon that will be chaired by former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Lieberman's event is scheduled between addresses by former president Bill Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The Jerusalem Post

YITZHAK LAOR, HAARETZ - Avigdor Lieberman is the successor to Meir Kahane, Rehavam Ze'evi and the settlers' faction in the Knesset. They have all promoted and are promoting racist politics, whether explicit (transfer) or in an implicit manner (Israel's right to the territories), under the aegis of Israeli democracy. . . Lieberman is the huge pumpkin that grew in this melon patch. . . They all came to power after military failures. . .

Things would not have reached the point of Lieberman's being appointed minister for strategic threats had we not undergone many years during which the defense establishment itself was swept up in this political whirlpool of using force against the Arabs in the name of "our forefathers." . . . Lieberman is more dangerous than his predecessors. He speaks to a huge public of immigrants, secular Jews, and he speaks of a "strong man," a new addition to the religion-security mix. Anyone who does not grasp that this is another stage in Israel's decline can adopt the cynicism of Olmert and Peretz. Education Minister Yuli Tamir can always wave her alibi: There was once a movement called Peace Now, and Tamir used to go to its meetings.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/782070.html

HAARETZ, MAY 2006 - Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came to the defense of Arab Knesset members after Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman Avigdor Lieberman on Thursday lashed out at Israeli Arab political parties and said he hoped Arab MKs who had contact with Hamas or did not celebrate Independence Day would be executed. During a Knesset plenum debate, Lieberman said Arab MKs who meet with Hamas leaders "are cooperating with the enemy" and must be tried. . .

"You are a racist," Labor MK Raleb Majadele told Lieberman. "You do not accept the decisions of the nation. You are two-faced." Hadash chairman MK Mohammed Barakeh accused Lieberman of making a terrible connection between a legitimate stance and the Nuremberg trials, which would lead to bloodshed of Arab lawmakers who marked the Nakba. He said that if anyone were to be tried, it should be Mafiosi such as Lieberman, who had once again proved that fascism is always the last refuge of villains. . . Ra'am-Ta'al MK Ahmed Tibi said Lieberman's "racist comments" were made by a "man for whom fascism has become a way of life and racism a tool of his trade."

SAREE MAKDISI, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA - We are told that Lieberman is unhelpful; that he is the wrong partner for the current Prime Minister; that he is unlikely to facilitate peace with the Palestinians; that he is unrestrained and irresponsible u and even (according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz) that he is a strategic threat himself.

This consensus is not a reaction to Lieberman's insalubrious background - though former nightclub bouncers rarely rise to national office in any country - but rather to the fact that he is willing to dispense with diplomatic niceties and to express Israel's ambitions in their crudest and most unapologetic form. Lieberman wants an Israel free of the land's indigenous population. His party's declared aim is to eject Israel's Palestinian minority -- now approaching a quarter of the population -- and to annex the parts of the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem with heavy Jewish settler populations.

The irony here, of course, is that Lieberman was born not in Israel but in a remote province of the former Soviet Union. He moved to Israel as an adult. Because he is Jewish, he was eligible for instant citizenship under Israel's law of return.

But it was evidently not enough for Lieberman that, as a Russian-speaking immigrant fresh off the plane, he was instantaneously granted rights and privileges denied to Palestinians born in the very country to which he had just moved (not to mention those expelled during the creation of Israel in 1948). The very presence of an indigenous non-Jewish population in Israel was, in effect, unacceptable to him.

So he wants the non-Jews out. And he says so bluntly.

It is Lieberman's blunt racism -- rather than the policies he stands for -- that makes Israel's advocates, particularly the liberal ones, feel so uncomfortable. For the only significant differences between Lieberman and other mainstream Israeli politicians are matters of style rather than substance.

[Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA]

BEN LYNFIELD, SCOTSMAN - Hebrew University professor Zeev Sternhell, Israel's leading academic specialist on fascism and totalitarianism, yesterday termed Mr Lieberman "perhaps the most dangerous politician in the history of the state of Israel". . . Mr Lieberman's view of Israel is one of a country where only Jews have political rights.

"Israel is our home. Palestine is theirs," Yisrael Beiteinu's election platform wrote, referring to Israel's Arab minority, which comprises 20 per cent of the population. In an interview with HaZofeh newspaper last month, Mr Lieberman said: "The vision I would like to see here is the entrenching of the Jewish and the Zionist state. I very much favour democracy, but when there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important."

His party's platform calls for the transfer of Arab areas of Israel to the Palestinian Authority and for annexing Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

"He has a genuine social power base among the Russian immigrants and in the lower middle class among people who think the Knesset and supreme court have too much power," Professor Sternhell said. . .

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