Avigdor Lieberman: Might Equals Right

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Neo-fascist Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman recently spoke to Newsweek. Amusingly, the interviewer was actually quite critical of Lieberman which is a reception rarely given to Israeli officials or any Israeli for that matter.

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But even the pro-Israel community in America harbors fears about Lieberman. Not long ago Lieberman was seen as a fringe political (more on that later) with ambitions but too radical and uncouth to be ever part of the Israeli establishment. A Soviet Jew who immigrated to Israel in his 20s and was a former night club bouncer and member of the outlawed, even by Israeli standards, far-right Kach party (deemed a terrorist organization) of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Lieberman has ridden tidal wave of a more militant Zionism emerging in Israel: one deeply suspicious of the world, resigned to a mentality of 'everyone hates us anyway so who cares what we do to the Palestinians', and more gung-ho than before. In addition, this new Zionism now has made the rather quite Arab minority in Israel a primary target: denounced as a fifth column and - in Lieberman's words - an "internal threat".

So Newsweek poses the questions:

You’re talking about drawing a line so that how many Israeli Arabs will no longer be part of Israel? At least half.

Polls suggest that 90 percent or more of Israeli Arabs don’t want that. You have 20 percent of the population that’s the Arab minority. You have 80 percent that’s Jewish. From 80 percent of the Jewish population, 70 percent support this idea.

In his world, might equals rights. America's Founding Father Benjamin Franklin argues that democracy is two wolves and a lamb debating what to have for dinner. The idea of individual liberty is that majorities cannot negate the right of minorities due simply to number-dominance. Individuals have inalienable rights. But Zionism has always been a collectivist project against the rights of individuals and a belief in the ethnic-dominance of one group of people to obviate the rights of another. So Lieberman is only echoing the Zionist ideal. After all, the only reason there's an Israel is because the early Zionists ethnically cleansed 800,000 Palestinians in order to establish an artificial Jewish majority by riding what was then a majority-Arab land of the Palestinians. Israel's first prime minister Ben-Gurion wrote in his journal that the Arabs would be kicked out. Lieberman is only continuing in Zionist tradition seeking to pick up where the Zionist elders left.

But he hits the mark here:

People see you as the radical, certainly in the Israeli context. I am the mainstream. When I started with my vision, I was really a small minority. Today we’re the third [largest] party in Israel.

Lieberman is right. Given the far-right trend in Israeli politics and the way that nation is moving, what was once the toxic far-right and dismissed is now the new Israeli center. He's got that one right. And it is a stinging statement on Israel.