Israeli Left-Right Divide Unmasked as Phony

A GOOD PIECE
By Nicola Nasser

"Avigdor Lieberman’s ascent to a strategic executive role in Israel has unmasked the artificial divide between left and right and revealed the mainstream ruling elite as still in consensus on the Zionist goals, a fact that rules out any credible peace process in the foreseeable future and dooms peace and left as wishful thinking as they have been ever since the creation of the Jewish state, until a forcible outside intervention could enforce a de-Zionization of peace-making.

The Jewish state is showing its real direction and unmasking its true identity that has been concealed since its creation with leftist posturing or by seemingly democratic wrangling between left and right.

“The most worrying thing about Lieberman is not that his ideas exist on a plane outside Israel's political continuum but that, in many ways, they are close to its dead centre… Not a single political party took to the streets to protest the very existence of a party based on a racist platform … The political doctrine is identical, and so is the political path.” (Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report, on Wednesday, October 25, 2006)

“Within Israel, there is nothing unprecedented about this (Lieberman’s) platform. In 1948 David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, presided over the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians. The country could not have been created in its current form without their enforced flight and the land seizures that followed. For this reason, denial of a Palestinian's right of return is still seen as a litmus test in mainstream Israeli politics,” said Weinberg.

Lieberman’s ascent seriously raises the question of whether there is still a peace camp, be it leftist or rightist, in the Zionist state, where both Jewish left-wingers and right-wingers are still die-hardly entrenched in their Zionist Ghetto mentality to keep it a racially pure Jewish state in an international era of globalization and democratization.

However camouflaging its extreme right-wing policies by ultra-leftist rhetoric could not conceal its rightist agenda; Israeli left has not in fact failed but unmasked as a propaganda front for the Zionist rightist agenda which nurtured both left and right and on which peace and the peace processes have crashed and doomed to be always evasive and illusive so long as Zionism remains the terms of reference for an Israeli peace-making based on dictating a fait accompli in the name of security.

Separation from the Palestinians geographically and demographically has evolved as the common denominator uniting even the far right and far left. What differences are still there between for instance Yossi Beilin and Lieberman? Separation is promoted by Lieberman with a plan to “transfer” Israeli Arab Palestinians and by Beilin with insistence on establishing the “original transfer” in 1948 as a fait accompli that could not be rectified. Israeli far left is posturing as if acting outside the framework of the Zionist agenda. Judging by the Geneva Accord (Initiative), the jewel of its peace efforts, which Beilin co-authored with the member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Abed Rabbo, Beilin is revealed as an ally of Lieberman by default.

Co-existence with the Arab citizens of Israel remains the test that will determine the peace with their other Arab compatriots and the Jewish state has so far failed this test, downgrading their citizenship to second status and expropriating their land property to less than two percent of its area in a premeditated policy to enforce their migration and “gradual transfer.”

In a globalization era it is very odd to watch Israeli leaders still determined to converge on a ghetto-styled nationalism that espouses racist and religious purity. What makes this nationalism very dangerous is turning it into a warrior’s ghetto mentality where an “army has a state,” in the words of a diplomat I met recently. The peace process has collapsed on this account and taken down with it the Israeli left and its so-called peace camp."