Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumThe Party Faithful - the rise of the Israeli far right
This article will appear in the New Yorker next week. It was linked to on Longform yesterday, and so has accumulated quite a few readers already. Long, but well worth a read.
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At a makeshift theatre in the port of Tel Aviv, hundreds of young immigrants from Melbourne, the Five Towns, and other points in the Anglophone diaspora gathered recently to hear from the newest phenomenon in Israeli politics, Naftali Bennett. A forty-year-old settlement leader, software entrepreneur, and ex-Army commando, Bennett promises to build a sturdy electoral bridge between the religious and the secular, the hilltop outposts of the West Bank and the start-up suburbs of the coastal plain. This is something new in the history of the Jewish state. Bennett is a man of the far right, but he is eager to advertise his cosmopolitan bona fides. Although he was the director general of the Yesha Council, the main political body of the settler movement, he does not actually live in a settlement. He lives in Raanana, a small city north of Tel Aviv that is full of programmers and executives. He is as quick to make reference to an episode of Seinfeld as he is to the Torah portion of the week. He constantly updates his Facebook page. A dozen years ago, he moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to seek his fortune in high tech, and his wife, Gilat, went to work as a pastry chef at chic restaurants like Aureole, Amuse, and Bouley Bakery. Her crème brûlée, he declares proudly, restored the faith of the Times food critic in the virtues of crème brûlée.
Closer to his ideological core is an unswerving conviction that the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem might as well relinquish their hopes for a sovereign state. The Green Line, which demarcates the occupied territories from Israel proper, has no meaning, he says, and only a friyer, a sucker, would think otherwise. As one of his slick campaign ads says, There are certain things that most of us understand will never happen: The Sopranos are not coming back for another season . . . and there will never be a peace plan with the Palestinians. If Bennett becomes Prime Minister somedayand his ambition is as plump and glaring as a harvest moonhe intends to annex most of the West Bank and let Arab cities like Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin be self-governing but under Israeli security.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/21/130121fa_fact_remnick#ixzz2I5bNSNOd
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/21/130121fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)mindset of Bennet. He has me curious, is this a complete detachment from the political
realities of why Bibi did not proceed with a ground invasion or is he just stupid?? The leaders of Egypt and Turkey
were not going to tolerate any ground invasion.
Bennet: During the recent assault on Gaza, Bennett was a proponent of a ground invasion and criticized Netanyahu when he limited the conflict to a week of air strikes.
You have to appreciate his candor, at least I do. I will do everything in my power to make sure they never get a state, he says of the Palestinians. No more negotiations, no more illusions. Let them eat crème brûlée.
I wonder if that could be managed onto a T-shirt.
Indeed: There are mornings when I wake up and think Netanyahu is serious about a two-state solution and others when I think he is bluffing the whole world, Dayan told me. And I suspect the same is true with Netanyahu.
shaayecanaan
(6,068 posts)The Palestinians will be expected to negotiate with a government whose ministers are mostly either in favour of annexing the West Bank, or are dead against a Palestinian state, or both.
BTW, I stumbled across this on longform, which is worth perusing regularly for some interesting reads:-
http://longform.org
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)LeftishBrit
(41,190 posts)It does remind me of the 'teabaggerization' of the Republican Party.
Violet_Crumble
(35,954 posts)If Israel keeps drifting to the Right the way it is, that extremist will be PM in sooner than ten to fifteen years, I suspect....