Sense of reality missing in toxic arena of Middle East politics
LAST Tuesday we were treated to two pieces of public performance art, one by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the other by Mahmoud Abbas, the closest thing the Palestinians have to an agreed national leader (which is not very close). Both performances were beyond bizarre, and taken together they demonstrate how politicians whose lives are dominated by the ArabIsraeli dispute are ultimately reduced to selfcaricature.
Abbas’s contribution was a rambling 90minute speech to the Palestinian National Council, the (unelected) legislature of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. It was the first full meeting of the council in 22 years, and an attempt by Abbas to restore some measure of legitimacy to his own position as President of the Palestinian Authority.
Abbas has lacked all legitimacy since his last legal term as president expired nine years ago. He survives as the nominal leader because (a) it suits the Israeli Government and (b) the Palestinians are so hopelessly divided that nobody bothers to challenge his claim to be the leader.
The ‘‘peace process’’ has been dead for 20 years. President Donald Trump is moving the United States embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem despite anguished Palestinian protests. Hamas, the Islamist rival to Abbas’s Fatah movement, controls the Gaza Strip and almost half the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, and it does not even deign to send delegates to Abbas’s meeting.
So what was Abbas’s speech about? History.
Not even real history.
Fantasy history, in which the Jews of Europe brought the Holocaust down upon themselves by choosing to fulfil a specific (and lucrative) ‘‘social function’’.
‘‘The Jewish question that was widespread throughout Europe,’’ Abbas explained, ‘‘was not against their religion but against their social function which relates to usury and banking and such.’’
Whatever Abbas may believe privately — and he may not believe much of anything after 30 years in the Hall of Mirrors that is Palestinian politics — he would once have known better than to say such vile nonsense in public. But all hope is gone, and there is nothing useful left to say, so he just dredges up the weary old Holocaust denial stuff he played with as a student and serves it raw to an equally despairing audience.
Netanyahu, by contrast, is on the winning side, and his contribution on Tuesday was an upmarket, updated version of his celebrated performance at the United Nations in 2012. That was when he showed the General Assembly a childlike drawing of a bomb (the kind 19thcentury terrorists used to throw, with a fizzing fuse at the top) and warned the diplomats that Iran would have a nuclear weapon by 2013.
It did not, of course. Iran’s brief period of working on nuclear weapons, triggered by Pakistan’s six nuclear weapons tests of 1998, had already ended in 2003, according to the testimony of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and even Netanyahu’s own intelligence agencies agreed with that assessment.
In 2015 Teheran agreed to allow strict international inspections to guarantee that no work on nuclear weapons, even of the most preliminary sort, would be done for the next 10 years. Netanyahu, who is paranoid on the subject, would have greatly preferred a ‘‘preemptive’’ attack on Iran — and now he has an ally in Trump, who also wants to kill the 2015 deal.
So Bibi did another showandtell performance on primetime Israeli television, all in English and aimed at the global audience, in which he more or less claimed that Iran was cheating on the agreement and still working on nuclear weapons. One of the visuals even said — in metrehigh letters — ‘‘Iran lied’’.
Netanyahu did not lie, of course; politicians seldom do. He just stood in front of aerial photos and images of documents and talked about recently acquired Iranian secret documents that showed the country had an active nuclear weapons programme. And it was all true — except that the
Iranian programme in question was mostly closed down in 2003, and completely dead by 2009.
‘‘There was nothing there,’’ Alexandra Bell, senior policy director at the Centre for Arms Control and NonProliferation, said.
‘‘There was nothing the International Atomic Energy Agency didn’t know, and all the theatrics and circa2004 PowerPoint were a bit silly.’’ So why did Netanyahu do it? Partly it was to provide something resembling a justification for his friend, Trump’s, forthcoming abandonment of the 2015 Iran deal. People who were not paying close attention might walk away from Netanyahu’s dogandpony show thinking he had proved that Iran was cheating on its commitments.
But mainly he did it because he lives in a political environment so polarised, so toxic, that people who are immersed in it gradually lose touch with reality. Even as Netanyahu carefully manipulated the facts in order to create a false impression, at another level he probably believed that he was expressing a deeper truth. He is a winner, not a loser, but he is just as much trapped on the wheel as Abbas.
❛ Abbas has lacked all legitimacy since his last legal term as president expired nine years ago.