Asshole of the Month: Benjamin Netanyahu
For over a year now, the world has endured another gut-wrenching orgy of violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict. A little history first: After the British unveiled the 1917 Balfour Declaration promising a homeland to the Jewish people in Palestine, a former region of the Ottoman Empire, Jews began to immigrate to the region in large numbers. The Arabs opposed this Zionist enterprise, first with legal means and civil protests, then with terror attacks, spurring Jewish militias to respond. In this century, two extremist parties continue this endless cycle of atrocity and revenge: on the Palestinian side, the fanatics in Hamas, and on the Israeli side, the fanatical Likud party led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving and most far-right prime minister in Israel’s history.
The serial bloodshed came very close to ending in the ’90s with the Oslo Accords, when PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) chairman and leader of the Fatah party Yasser Arafat agreed to forswear terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist; in return, Israel agreed to negotiate with Arafat and withdraw from designated Palestinian lands conquered and occupied ever since the 1967 War, as mandated by U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. In a famous photo op, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands. But extremists on both sides were furiously opposed to “land for peace,” and Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing lunatic in 1995, opening the door for Netanyahu and his conservative Likud party to assume power in 1996. Netanyahu had vociferously opposed Oslo.
Bibi lost in the election three years later, and during negotiations in 2000, Arafat and Netanyahu’s successor Ehud Barak blamed each other for the failures of the Oslo peace process, with Arafat ultimately triggering the Second Intifada in 2000—a series of horrific conflicts between Palestinian militant forces and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that claimed the lives of over 1,000 Israelis and nearly 5,000 Palestinians.
