Israel's Likud Vote Further Blow to Peace Talks

Sunday May 12, 2002

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's ruling Likud Party dealt a further blow to prospects for Middle East peace talks by voting late on Sunday against any future establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

The Likud vote came at a heated party convention in Tel Aviv and marked a victory for former Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu over Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a looming battle for the party leadership. The Likud vote also signaled a domestic battle for Sharon as Netanyahu attempts to win the leadership of the party before general elections scheduled for next year. Netanyahu, putting forward his position, said that for peace, Israel needed complete territorial control, a buffer zone to restrict movements of Palestinians, and to expel or dispose of Arafat. "It is clear now that we cannot reach any kind of solution at all with the Palestinians," Netanyahu said. Sharon himself has long been reluctant to deal with the issue of a Palestinian state. He told the meeting: "We do not deal at all with the Palestinian state now. It does not stand on the agenda of the day."

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said the vote placed in danger any hope of an agreement. He said it showed the true intentions of Israel and would increase frustrations of Palestinians locked in a violent 19-month-old struggle against Israeli rule.

"How many Palestinians will wake up tomorrow to say 'we have nothing to lose'?" he told CNN. "I hope it will be an eye-opener to (U.S.) President Bush."

The vote strengthened the right-wing of Israel's Likud-led coalition government, which includes the Labour Party of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Sharon had told the assembled party members Palestinians must end violence and reform their political structures before he would allow any talk of them establishing a state. The party preferred the harder message delivered by Netanyahu, who vowed: "A state with all the rights of a state, this cannot be, not under Arafat, nor under another leadership, not today, nor tomorrow."

"The end game is now clear," Palestinian negotiator Erekat said. "This war is not against terror but to continue ruling 3.3 million Palestinians. It is very dangerous and I hope it will be an eye opener to the world to show them who we are dealing with."

Israel's strategy of using its influence on the American political system to turn the U.S. national security apparatus into its own personal attack dog--or Golem--has alienated the United States from much of the Third World, has worsened U.S. ties to Europe amid rancorous insinuations of anti-Semitism, and makes the United States a hated bully. And by cutting off all diplomatic lines of retreat--as Sharon did when he publicly made President Bush, the leader of the Free World, look like an impotent fool--Israel paradoxically forces the United States to draw closer to Israel because there is no thinkable alternative for American politicians than continuing to invest political capital in Israel.

We have now reached the point where there may be no turning back as nuclear Armageddon beckons from the Middle East. Writing recently in The Washington Post, Chris Patten, the European commissioner for external relations, says "a senior Democratic senator [alas, Patten does not name him] told a visiting European the other day: 'All of us here are members of Likud now.'"

So it has come to this: members of the world's greatest deliberative body, the heirs of Clay, La Follette, and Taft, now identify themselves with a radical political movement that grew out of the terrorism of Judeo-Fascist and Mussolini admirer Vladimir Jabotinsky; Menachim Begin, co-conspirator in the bombing of the King David Hotel; and Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila.

Whether they identify with Sharon's Israel because of crass political advantage, or because, like those of Senator Inhofe's, their views are indistinguishable from the delusions of a certifiable lunatic, our Vichy Congress is driving us down the path of a final, fatal clash of civilizations. All Americans, be they old-line conservatives who hate seeing their country hopelessly embroiled in the Old World's perpetual quarrels, or liberals in the honorable anti-imperilialist and antimilitarist tradition of William Jennings Bryan, or the apolitical who resent the prospect of becoming an irradiated corpse, must put aside their differences and start loudly and persistently identifying these Congressional Likudniki for what they are: Quislings.

George Sunderland is the pen name of a Congressional staff member. Comments to Sunderland can be sent to counterpunch@counterpunch.org