The cynicism here is almost comical. The Australian Jewish community and their American Jewish friends are deeply concerned about the plight of Gilad Shalit currently in Gaza. They are ably assisted by pieces such as this in the Washington Post, comparing Hamas to the Nazis. Leaders of the Zionist lobby in the US write articles explaining how the Jewish state is constantly striving for peace and only wants resolution of the conflict.
What’s so absurd is that less and less people believe any of this spin. How tone-deaf is the Zionist community? This is what Israel has become:
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister, set out last week what he called a “blueprint for a resolution to the conflict” with the Palestinians that demands most of the country’s large Palestinian minority be stripped of citizenship and relocated outside Israel’s future borders.
Lieberman warned that Israel faces growing diplomatic pressure for a full withdrawal to the Green Line, the pre-1967 border. Lieberman said that, if such a partition were implemented, “the conflict will inevitably pass beyond those borders and into Israel.”
He accused many of Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of acting against Israel while their leaders “actively assist those who want to destroy the Jewish state.”
Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party campaigned in last year’s elections on a platform of “No loyalty, no citizenship” and has proposed a raft of loyalty laws over the past year targeted at the Palestinian minority.
True peace, the foreign minister claimed, would come only with land swaps, or “an exchange of populated territories to create two largely homogeneous states, one Jewish Israeli and the other Arab Palestinian.” He added that under his plan “those Arabs who were in Israel will now receive Palestinian citizenship.”
Unusually, Lieberman, who is also deputy prime minister, offered his plan in a commentary for the English-language Israeli daily newspaper Jerusalem Post, apparently in an attempt to make maximum impact on the international community.
He has spoken repeatedly in the past about drawing the borders in a way to forcibly exchange Palestinian communities in Israel for the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.