Sunday, November 7, 2010

The Nobleman and the Horse


By Uri Avnery
Palestine Chronicle

"....The American public now resembles the man in the joke. They sent to Washington a large group of Tea Party types, but the coffee drinkers in the White house are still in control.

The Israeli leadership did not know how to treat the results of this election. Are they good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?

The big winner of the American election is none other than Binyamin Netanyahu.

His policy is similar to that of his political mentor, Yitzhak Shamir. It is based on the Jew who had to teach the Polish nobleman’s horse to read and to write within a year – otherwise the whole shtetel would be massacred. “A year is a long time,” he tried to soothe his weeping wife, “Within a year the horse or the nobleman will be dead.”

Shamir’s game was to postpone everything, miss every opportunity to bring peace closer, gain time.....

There is something crazy in this situation: our government is rushing light-heartedly towards a clash with the only remaining ally we have in the world. No realistic alternative can be detected on the horizon.

This is, by itself, an ominous fact, because the American Empire is in a slow but continuing decline in all areas – economic, political, military and cultural. This is a protracted process that will take many years, but Israel should be positioning itself to accommodate the rise of new centers of power. The Netanyahu government is doing the exact opposite: it is challenging the entire world and acting consistently to isolate Israel.

Unlike the story about the Jew, the nobleman and the horse – this is not a joke."

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