Opinion: Mr. Netanyahu, Go Home

I first heard Mr. "BeeBee" Netanyahu speak at a business luncheon where I was working as a reporter for the newsletter of the exclusive organization that had invited him.

One of the aspects of Mr. Netanyahu that struck me was his rather unbelievable pomposity and the other was his lack of respect for the truth..

For instance, he denied at the meeting that Israel had started any new settlements on the West Bank and had no intention whatsoever of building any.

"This is all," he said, " the usual anti-Israel propaganda spread by extremist Arab organizations."

After the speech, where he made a great point of thanking one luncheon guest, a member of the billionaire Tisch family of NYC for his financial support of Israel, one woman who worked for another billionaire Jewish family said to me," How can he say that about the settlements? CBS' "60 Minutes" just had a segment on all the new ones they are building !"( and in fact, much more in this line was to come, such as more and more confiscation of Palestinian property and the building of superhighways on which Palestinians were not allowed to travel).

The wife of another Jewish member, ( not billionaires) said to me, "Uh, Mr. Netanyahu has what we Jews call, uh ,' Chutzpah', 
which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the circumstances..."

Well, BeeBee is once again demonstrating to the world the way he likes to indulge this "chutzpah" by his most recent visit to the U.S., where he intends to lecture Obama in a speech to Congress.

Obama is not very happy about this, of course, and has risked the donations of what is often called the "Israel Lobby" by opposing the visit and the speech.  Since he is no longer going to be running for office and no longer needs those donations personally, he has more leeway than a lot of members of his party...

The "Israel Lobby" is also rather profoundly focused on labeling anyone who criticizes its actions as "anti-Semitic" and will use all kinds of tactics to squash anyone they think deserves this label. In fact, I feel I am probably being more than a little reckless in writing what I am writing ( it may be my "Charlie Hebdo Moment").

Mr. Netanyahu likes to hit people over the head with the theme that Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East and the only friend the U.S. has there. This is--uh, something of a fib in terms of the goal of most of Mr. Netanyahu's supporters in this--denying the franchise to Palestinians who live within the borders of the Israeli state and other actions that have led more severe opponents of his to label Israel a " crypto Apartheid state."

He has  good reason to be worried about the intentions of the Palestinians and other Arabs, who have a definite problem in the "Live and Let Live" issue that keeps coming up not just in the Middle East but in many other parts of the world ( and not just ones where Islamic terrorists are at work, either. While  incredible progress has been made in finding a "Live and Let Live" solution to the problems of Northern Ireland ( one which I think deserves applause for the major political participants there) 
we should have no illusions about the lethal intentions of Islamic extremists when it comes to the State of Israel.

A Palestinian acquaintance of mine once said to me, " There is an incredible bitterness and hatred of Israel in the average Palestinian and I would be skeptical of anyone , especially a Palestinian, who denies this."

We have then, no easy solution in the Middle East ( or Afghanistan or many other places, for that matter) and extremists and terrorists who are giving murderers of the past such as the Nazis a  run for their money when it comes to absolute barbarism...

We also have people among us such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin who compare labor unions in his state to ISIS.  Mr. Walker has found allies in this drivel among some people who should know better, such as Firefighters in Wisconsin, and, of course, New York City ...

My own feeling is that this is an extremely inopportune moment for Mr. Netanyahu to flaunt his "chutzpah" no matter how precarious any agreement with the present Iranian regime is going to be. I frankly feel we are indeed taking a big risk in trying to negotiate with the Iranians and that it  is even more fraught with risk than Obama's intervention in Libya was. 

(However, gone are the days of Teddy Roosevelt when the U.S. can simply go charging off into battle with the knowledge that we can do so without it  possibly coming back to bite us in the backside  to put it mildly).

This is, to put it simply, probably the best chance to negotiate the U.S. has had with the Iranians in a long time, no matter how risky doing so may be. We would all be better off if Mr. Nethanyahu could stuff a sock in it for once and just stay home...

--Blogger