Israeli PM Netanyahu ‘America Won’t Get in Our Way..It’s Easily Moved’

The Netanyahu video

Ma’an, 19/07/2010 12:54

There is one video Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles. To date, the 10-minute segment has been broadcast only in Hebrew on Israel’s Channel 10.

Its contents, however, threaten to gravely embarrass not only Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama.

The film was shot, apparently without Netanyahu’s knowledge, nine years ago, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started re-invading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada.

At the time Netanyahu had taken a short break from politics but was soon to join Sharon’s government as finance minister.

On a visit to the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank to pay condolences to the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting attack, he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999.

Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

Bibi:…The Arabs are currently focusing on a war of terror and they think it will break us. The main thing, first of all, is to hit them. Not just one blow, but blows that are so painful that the price will be too heavy to be borne. The price is not too heavy to be borne, now. A broad attack on the Palestinian Authority. To bring them to the point of being afraid that everything is collapsing… Woman: Wait a moment, but then the world will say “how come you’re conquering again?” Netanyahu: the world won’t say a thing. The world will say we’re defending. Woman: Aren’t you afraid of the world, Bibi? Netanyahu: Especially today, with America. I know what America is. America is something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction. Child: They say they’re for us, but, it’s like… Netanyahu: They won’t get in our way. They won’t get in our way. Child: On the other hand, if we do some something, then they… Netanyahu: So let’s say they say something. So they said it! They said it! 80% of the Americans support us. It’s absurd. We have that kind of support and we say “what will we do with the…” Look. That administration [Clinton] was extremely pro-Palestinian. I wasn’t afraid to maneuver there. I was not afraid to clash with Clinton. I was not afraid to clash with the United Nations. I was paying the price anyway, I preferred to receive the value. Value for the price.

In the following segment, Bibi boasts about how he emptied the Oslo Accords of meaning by an interpretation that made a mockery of them: Woman: The Oslo Accords are a disaster. Netanyahu: Yes. You know that and I knew that…The people [nation] has to know… What were the Oslo Accords? The Oslo Accords, which the Knesset signed, I was asked, before the elections: “Will you act according to them?” and I answered: “yes, subject to mutuality and limiting the retreats.” “But how do you intend to limit the retreats?” “I’ll give such interpretation to the Accords that will make it possible for me to stop this galloping to the ’67 [armistice] lines. How did we do it? Narrator: The Oslo Accords stated at the time that Israel would gradually hand over territories to the Palestinians in three different pulses, unless the territories in question had settlements or military sites. This is where Netanyahu found a loophole. Netanyahu: No one said what defined military sites. Defined military sites, I said, were security zones. As far as I’m concerned, the Jordan Valley is a defined military site. Woman: Right [laughs]…The Beit She’an Valley.