Israel Matzav

Disenfranchising the Israeli public

Caroline Glick reports that the Israeli media is trying to disenfranchise the Israeli public.

As Barak’s rise to power in 1999 makes clear, the media’s bid to demonize the Right and undermine Israel’s alliance with the US in the hopes of restoring the Left to power is nothing new. But this week, a leading media siren was kind enough to expose the media’s entire strategy for disenfranchising the public.

Haaretz’s veteran columnist Akiva Eldar performed this service in a pair of articles published on Tuesday in the Guardian and Haaretz.

Eldar co-authored his Guardian article with his comrade Carlo Strenger. It was their response to Erekat’s declaration of eternal war. Eldar’s main message to Erekat was that he should keep his plans to himself. Certainly he shouldn’t be blabbing about them in a place the Israeli public was liable to see them. It could wreck the media’s entire plan to discredit the government.

Eldar and Strenger scolded, “Erekat’s article is disappointing.

He is not just a private citizen, but the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, and he knows Israel and its internal dynamics very well. He knows that raising the right of return at this moment plays into the hands of Israel’s right wing: they will be able to say: ‘We always told you so: the two-state solution is just a Palestinian plot to incorporate the Jewish state into the Greater State of Palestine.’” But then again, as Eldar showed in his article in Haaretz, Erekat doesn’t really have anything to worry about. Eldar and his comrades will keep the Israeli public in the dark about Erekat’s determination to destroy Israel.

Ignoring completely what Erekat wrote, Eldar’s column in Haaretz started where Friedman’s ended. He placed all the blame for the absence of a peace process on Netanyahu’s shoulders. He accused Netanyahu of destroying Israel’s alliance with the US by not embracing Obama’s latest request to abrogate Jewish property rights in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. He then claimed that due to Netanyahu’s behavior, the Obama administration has decided to follow in the Clinton administration’s footsteps and overthrow his government.

As Eldar put it, “When Clinton recently invited Kadima leader Tzipi Livni to a private meeting, this signified an unofficial announcement that Netanyahu’s account in Washington has been closed.”

He continued, “Twelve years ago, when Hillary Clinton’s husband realized that... [Netanyahu] had no intention of honoring his signature (on the Wye River Accord with Yasser Arafat), that was Netanyahu’s last stop before being sent back to his villa in Caesarea.”

So this is the game. The media and the US administration are again colluding with the Israeli Left’s political leadership to overthrow the Netanyahu government. They are willfully ignoring both the will of Israel’s voters and the declared commitment of their favorite “moderate” Palestinians to fight Israel until it is destroyed in order to blame the absence of peace on Netanyahu.

THIS GAME can stop. But two things must happen first.

The Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment that supports it must pay a price for seeking to undermine the elected government of the US’s most important strategic ally in the region. And Israeli voters – who gave Kadima more mandates in the Knesset than any other party in the last elections – must abandon Livni and her Astroturf party.

Until these things begin to happen we can expect our media to continue to collude with its American partners, and with Livni and Barak, to undermine the will of the public.

Read the whole thing. It would be much easier to defend Netanyahu if he didn't insist on trying to please Obama.

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Obama administration's fecklessness

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:27 PM