{"id":177474,"date":"2019-09-10T18:27:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T23:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/09\/10\/worse-than-a-crime-its-a-mistake\/"},"modified":"2019-09-10T18:27:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T23:27:00","slug":"worse-than-a-crime-its-a-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/09\/10\/worse-than-a-crime-its-a-mistake\/","title":{"rendered":"Worse than a Crime, It’s a Mistake"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>
This Business Will get out of Control. It Will get out of Control and we’ll be Lucky to Live Through It.<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

Just when you thought that the political opportunism of Benyamin Netanyahu could not get any more short sighted and destructive, he is promising to annex most of the West Bank as a campaign promise<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Tuesday that he would move swiftly to annex nearly a third of the occupied West Bank if voters returned him to power in the election next week, seizing what he called a historic opportunity from a sympathetic White House to give Israel \u201csecure, permanent borders.\u201d<\/p>\n

His plan to annex territory along the Jordan River would reshape the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and would reduce any future Palestinian state to an enclave encircled by Israel.<\/p>\n

Mr. Netanyahu\u2019s rivals on the left and right largely greeted the announcement, made in the heat of a campaign in which he is battling for survival, as a transparent political ploy.<\/p>\n

Mr. Netanyahu said he planned to annex all Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and that he would move immediately after forming a new government to annex the Jordan Valley, a strategic and fertile strip of territory along the border with Jordan that runs from Beit Shean in northern Israel to the shores of the Dead Sea.<\/p>\n

He said he wanted to capitalize on what he called the \u201cunique, one-off opportunity\u201d afforded him by the Trump administration, which has expressed openness<\/a> to Israeli annexation of at least parts of the West Bank.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven\u2019t had such an opportunity since the Six Day War, and I doubt we\u2019ll have another opportunity in the next 50 years,\u201d Mr. Netanyahu said at a news conference in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. \u201cGive me the power to guarantee Israel\u2019s security. Give me the power to determine Israel\u2019s borders.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war. Most of the world considers it occupied territory and Israeli settlements or annexations there to be illegal.Mr. Netanyahu, who is in a dead heat or slightly behind in the polls against Benny Gantz, a centrist former army chief of staff, has tried mightily to shift the focus of the election from the corruption cases against him to his strong suit: national security.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

This time, Mr. Netanyahu boasted that thanks to \u201cmy personal relationship with President Trump, I will be able to annex all the settlements in the heart of our homeland.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Assuming that Netanyahu isn’t lying, and Netanyahu lies like the rest of us breath, the end game for this strategy seems to be the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.<\/p>\n

Not good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Business Will get out of Control. It Will get out of Control and we’ll be Lucky to Live Through It. Just when you thought that the political opportunism of Benyamin Netanyahu could not get any more short sighted and destructive, he is promising to annex most of the West Bank as a campaign promise: …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[375,394,488,378,374],"class_list":["post-177474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-elections","tag-foreign-relations","tag-israel","tag-middle-east","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177474"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}