Bankruptcy on Display. More Geneva Ugliness

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.

The Palestinian participants appeared well-rehearsed and put their case cogently, never departing from their central theme, a powerful indictment of Israeli actions and the Jewish state per se.

Israeli speakers, for their part, appeared to be at sea and at odds with each other’s messages all of which harped on peace as a concept without too much content. Nothing was said about Palestinian suicidal terror, the fading of the Oslo Peace Accords and who buried them, or even the Middle East road map. Displays of abject self-abasement before Palestinians such as the one presented to the Geneva audience must surely be rare. A Palestinian troupe played and sang the Prisoners Song by Muhammad Darwish, the anthem of the Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons. The Israeli audience, including ex-chief of staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, applauded.

Former US president Jimmy Carter and Hollywood actor Richard Dreyfuss launched tirades against the Bush administration and its head. Carter accused George W. Bush of failing to address the sufferings of the Palestinian people which he said were the main cause of terror and hostility towards America in the Middle East. In other words, Bush policies were responsible for world terrorism – an unusually harsh judgment of a White House incumbent to be voiced in public by a former US president, especially in the middle of a war.

A key role in the proceedings and the drafting of the Geneva Accord was played – albeit behind the scenes – by another American called Rob Malley, formerly of the Clinton team. Of Egyptian origin, Malley does not admit to being Jewish. He was one of Clinton’s senior advisers at the August 2000 Camp David talks between Arafat and prime minister Ehud Barak, whose failure led into Arafat’s current terrorist confrontation with Israel.

The tenor of Carter’s address seemed to indicate that the ex-president has made common cause with the American Democratic left wing and certain European leaders to challenge Bush on his Iraq policy and his attitude towards the Palestinians.

Some excellent, and I thing completely accurate, analysis of the Geneva Atrocity from DEBKA. What the whole dispicable farce underlines for me is the totaql bankruptcy of the Israeli Left. They have, effectively, abdicated Zionism. They no longer believe in a Jewish State, whatever its borders, and are now actively working, maybe with the best of intentions, though I think ego and moral arrogance are their major motivations, to undermine and destroy the overwhelmingly elected government of Ariel Sharon. It also points to the attempt on the part of the European establishment to construct an international elite which will operate in a supra-national fashion, negating the sovreignty of democratic nations and the policies of elected governments whenever it sees fit. The European establishment and the Israeli left are soulmates in their moral bankruptcy, abject cowardice, and proclivity for suicide. I sincerely hope Beilin forms his party and runs with Geneva as his platform, he'll be destroyed, but it wont stop the international campaign to deny the Jewish people their sovereign rights. That is the campaign which Beilin is now aiding and abetting, and the campaign which all Zionists must work to delegitimize and defeat. The moral and political bankruptcy of one part of the Israeli political spectrum notwithstanding.