More Senior Israeli Security Figures Lining Up Against Netanyahu
This past week an Associated Press story began making the rounds about the increasing number of Israeli military and intelligence heavyweights taking a stand against the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Tuesday, a group representing more than 200 retired leaders in Israel’s military, police, Mossad spy service and Shin Bet security agency presented a plan to help end the half-century occupation of the Palestinians through unilateral steps, including disavowing claims to over 90 percent of the West Bank and freezing Jewish settlement construction in such areas.
The Prime Minister and his allies are, naturally, not taking this lying down:
Netanyahu and his supporters have had a fairly easy time fending off opponents, however prominent, dismissing them as “leftists” naive about the security imperative of territory in a tough Middle East.
His base, if anything, shares the distrust of experts and elites increasingly visible in the developed world, as evidenced by the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and last week’s passage of Britain’s proposal to leave the European Union.
David Bitan, the chairman of Netanyahu’s parliamentary coalition, tried to use this tactic last weekend. “Something happens to people when they become Mossad and Shin Bet directors. They turn into leftists,” he said.
That’s right…200 retired military, police and intelligence leaders (including every living former director of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the FBI) are all LEFTISTS.
What is at stake? The future of the Jewish state.
The driving narrative is that the Holy Land’s 6 million Jews must find a way of detaching themselves from the roughly equivalent number of Arabs, most of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza and do not have voting rights in Israel.
Without the establishment of a Palestinian state, the argument goes, Israel will either eventually have to extend voting rights, formally absorbing the Palestinians in the occupied territories and destroying itself as a Jewish-majority country, or else be branded a non-democracy destined to suffer comparisons to South African apartheid and risking a similar fate.
Many friends of Israel here and elsewhere found it easy to dismiss this argument when it was being made by Jimmy Carter. Now we have hundreds of Israeli military, police and intelligence leaders saying the very same thing.
Please take a few moments and read the entire article:
