From the Editor

Bibi's Empty Rhetoric

Benjamin Netanyahu officially began his electoral campaign with panache on December 27. He gave a long, rousing speech at Likud headquarters, where it turned out Netanyahu was running against--himself. To be sure, he didn't put it that way. He spent most of the speech supposedly attacking Labor, but, as Haifa economics professor Steven Plaut points out, the sins of which he accused it were all his own. Thus he attacked Labor for permitting the PLO to operate official offices in Jerusalem. Yet here it is two and a half years into Likud rule and all the PLO offices are still operating. He accused Labor of not insisting on reciprocity, of not demanding that the Palestinian Authority live up to its commitments. And what about himself? Since when has Netanyahu provided anything but empty rhetoric when it comes to compliance? Where was the PLO's compliance to the supposedly ironclad commitments Netanyahu obtained for the abandonment of Hebron? The same carpet was sold by the PA at Wye with equally farcical results.

Indeed, at Wye there was not even the familiar carpet, for as readers of Douglas Feith's "Wye and the Road to War" (Commentary, January 1999) learn, Wye is an agreement in which Israel pledges to retreat from more territory, with nothing in return. Feith points out that what the Clinton administration focused on in forging the Wye agreement was "protecting the Oslo process from present and future disputes over compliance. In practice, this meant not curing existing violations or preventing future ones but suppressing and precluding complaints about them....Such are the Wye accords--documents replete with undefined terms, unaddressed contingencies, unauthorized interpretations, loopholes, and lacunae (grammatical errors, too)." And who, under terms of the Wye agreement, will decide if the PA is in compliance? Why, the CIA! Feith points out the absurdity of believing that the CIA would cast doubt on the PA's living up to its commitments (no matter how obviously and clearly it violated them) when the U.S. administration is so determined to keep Oslo going.

And so Netanyahu's campaign platform is set. He will run against Labor, pretending it was Labor that has enjoyed uninterrupted rule since 1993. But then, so it has.

Meretz Joins Hadash

If Netanyahu's campaign against himself was not extraordinary enough, there is the spectacle of the ostensibly Zionist Party Meretz joining with the vociferously anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist party Hadash, formerly known as the Israeli Arab Communist Party in the forthcoming Israeli elections. Our thanks to Steven Plaut for bringing to our attention this odd couple, who have decided to coordinate political platforms, in effect running together under the same platform. As Plaut notes, Meretz is the politically correct party beloved by American Jewish liberals, whose front groups are funded by the New Israel Fund. No less a one than Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, was formerly a member of the board of Americans for Peace Now, basically Meretz-in-the-U.S.

Hadash has no PC pretensions. It is an Arab nationalist party making no bones about its goal of eventually replacing Israel with a "secular democratic state of Palestine" run by the PLO. (The Communism was a veneer designed to give the party legal standing in the now far-off period when the Israeli Supreme Court outlawed nakedly anti-Israel parties without other ideological coloration, ruling they could not run lists for the Knesset.) Hadash has not changed its policies. What the linkage between Meretz and Hadash signifies is the "coming out" of Meretz as an anti-Zionist party, its abandonment of its Zionist pretenses. Meretz thus ranks as the spearhead of what will doubtless be a growing movement of Jews to abolish the Jewish state.

A delicious irony. Meretz, with all its PC rhetorical devotion to democracy, civil rights, politics-in-the-sunshine, has decided to dispense with all that in its own case. It has abandoned its formerly much-touted internal elections for the party's Knesset slate. This time, Plaut reports, the slate will be chosen by the party's gurus in a smoke-filled room. (Or could it be, in tribute to the times, a smokeless room?)

Barak on Compliance

Labor Party candidate for Prime Minister Ehud Barak has come up with a novel way to avoid the issue of compliance that has caused Netanyahu so much grief. Wave it away. Declare your profound brain is absorbed

(Continued on p.8)

Outpost               - 2 -               January 1999