Why should anyone believe Netanyahu?.

[Violet_Crumble]

How many politicians, media people and ordinary citizens believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sincerely interested in reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians?

By Akiva Eldar

If the law enabled putting leaders on trial for serial defrauding of the public and obtaining support through deception, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be keeping company with Moshe Katsav in prison. The former president has been convicted of raping women who were his subordinates and misuse of his authority. Netanyahu is having his nefarious way with Israeli democracy and using his status in order to lead Israeli society astray, all the way to diplomatic and economic isolation. From there it is but a short way to regional war and apartheid - the only question is which will come first. Yet nevertheless, a whole country is continuing to give in willingly to a liar who does not cease to harass and endanger it.

Have I exaggerated? How many politicians, media people and ordinary citizens believe Netanyahu is sincerely interested in reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians? The reference, of course, is not to an agreement that will include Israeli control over the Jordan Valley for 40 years, as Netanyahu proposed recently to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

During the course of a condolence visit to one of the Jewish settlements at the end of the 1990s, Netanyahu bragged that he had succeeded in deceiving the Clinton administration during his first term as prime minister, in order to destroy the Oslo Accords. Believing the microphones and cameras had been turned off, Netanyahu related how he had extorted from the Clinton administration, in exchange for the Hebron agreement, a promise that Israel would be the sole entity entitled to define what the "military sites" are that will remain under its control. With a sly smile spread across his face, Bibi added: "I said that as far as I am concerned the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military site," and explained: "Why is this important? Because from that moment I stopped the Oslo Accords."

Yitzhak Shamir, Netanyahu's predecessor in the Likud leadership, put this in simple words: "For the Land of Israel it is permissible to lie." Netanyahu, a student of conservative American media advisor Arthur Finkelstein, has a more sophisticated formulation. In a lecture at a Likud conference in Eilat in July 2001, Bibi instructed the activists: "It doesn't matter if justice is on your side. You have to depict your position as just."

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/why-should-anyone-believe-netanyahu-1.395439

[chavi]

1. Error: You can't recommend threads from this forum

:thumbsup:

[Scurrilous]

2. There is no reason to believe him. n/t

[azurnoir]

3. I believe what Netanyahu does what he says is another story n/t