DEBKAfile - Bailin's Geneva Stepping Stone to Top of Israeli Politics
This is an article going back to December 2003 and the Geneva celebration over the accords. It is good background material for my Column "More Democracy, Please!" which is posted just below.
"No Israeli TV channel aired the Geneva ceremony in full, merely selecting what appeared to the different reporters to be a balanced version. That is unfortunate. The Israeli electorate was entitled to a live, unexpurgated version of a political event of such importance. They would have seen for themselves how Palestinian representatives took over and dominated the occasion with strident diatribes against US President George Bush and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and warm praise for Yasser Arafat. One speaker after another, his back to the olive tree adorning the platform, accused Israel of practicing the same sort of apartheid as the white regime of South Africa, of directing cruel racialist policies against the Palestinian people and of building settlements and a separation wall to satisfy its siege mentality."
For the first time in Israel's 50 years as a state, therefore, an aspiring Israeli politician has embarked on a militant course to alienate Israel from its powerful, close historic partnership with the United States and replace it with European backing for himself as their Israeli spokesman and for his political aspirations. This is what the Geneva Accord and Bailin's close ties with Palestinian leaders are all about.
All the same, US secretary of state Colin Powell is willing to receive Europe's new Middle East protege in Washington later this week.
Most surprising of all is the absence of any response to the Geneva spectacle and its damaging implications for his own polices from prime minister Sharon's office. "
Read the whole thing here:
DEBKAfile - Bailin's Geneva Stepping Stone to Top of Israeli Politics:
"No Israeli TV channel aired the Geneva ceremony in full, merely selecting what appeared to the different reporters to be a balanced version. That is unfortunate. The Israeli electorate was entitled to a live, unexpurgated version of a political event of such importance. They would have seen for themselves how Palestinian representatives took over and dominated the occasion with strident diatribes against US President George Bush and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and warm praise for Yasser Arafat. One speaker after another, his back to the olive tree adorning the platform, accused Israel of practicing the same sort of apartheid as the white regime of South Africa, of directing cruel racialist policies against the Palestinian people and of building settlements and a separation wall to satisfy its siege mentality."
For the first time in Israel's 50 years as a state, therefore, an aspiring Israeli politician has embarked on a militant course to alienate Israel from its powerful, close historic partnership with the United States and replace it with European backing for himself as their Israeli spokesman and for his political aspirations. This is what the Geneva Accord and Bailin's close ties with Palestinian leaders are all about.
All the same, US secretary of state Colin Powell is willing to receive Europe's new Middle East protege in Washington later this week.
Most surprising of all is the absence of any response to the Geneva spectacle and its damaging implications for his own polices from prime minister Sharon's office. "
Read the whole thing here:
DEBKAfile - Bailin's Geneva Stepping Stone to Top of Israeli Politics:
posted by Barry Freedman at 7:31 PM
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