Benjamin Netanyahu

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Benjamin Netanyahu in 2012.
If you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you, that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.

Benjamin Netanyahu (born 1949) is the Prime Minister of Israel and Chairman of the Likud Party. Nicknamed King Bibi, both by supporters and detractors, he is one of the most virulently hawkish Israeli national leaders in their history; he's essentially Tel Aviv's very own Dick Cheney.

Contents

[edit] Career

He was first prime minister from 1996 (the one time the premiership was directly elected) to 1999, where he ran an American-style negative campaign that demonized his opponents to hell and back; he lost to Ehud Barak, who used the exact same tactics, in 1999. While he's mostly remembered for his foreign policy, Netanyahu's domestic policy is hardly any better, as in each of his four terms, he privatized state-run industries and set the country into a free market wasteland that led to economic fuck-up after economic fuck-up; a housing crisis has characterized his latest tenure. As Minister of Finance in 2003-2005, Netanyahu engaged in a major reform of the Israeli economy. He instituted a program to end welfare dependency by requiring people to apply for jobs or training. He reduced the size of the public sector, reformed and streamlined the taxation system and attacked monopolies and cartels to increase competition. The once-venerated safety net was demolished. These Thatcherite policies enriched the few while depowering the many, leading to Israel having one of the largest wealth gaps in the world.

He sharply criticized Ariel Sharon's disengagement from Gaza, believing that Israel should have maintained full control over it. He became the leader of Likud and Opposition Leader shortly thereafter, returned to power in 2009, and subsequently won two more terms in 2013 and 2015; should he reign until July 2019, he would be the longest running prime minister in Israel's history, after founding father David Ben-Gurion. As another source of national queasiness, Netanyahu is the only Prime Minister thus far who was actually born in the State of Israel; both Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert were born in the early-to-mid 1940s.

He was one of the neocons who said removing Saddam Hussein would bring a "guarantee" of stability and security in the region, and firmly pushed for the Iraq War. [1] [2] [3] He consistently claims that Iran is either close to obtaining nukes, about to obtain nukes, or has already obtained nukes; he firmly believes Iran is a threat to Israeli hegemony in the region, but leaked reports from the Mossad have consistently debunked his bullshit on Iran making any nukes at all. [4] [5]

[edit] Positions

His record on Palestine is likely his worst policy, along with his marrying of the right wing to the religious fundamentalists of the country. Netanyahu's infamous for repeatedly building settlements on Palestinian soil, and justifying his actions by claiming that it's Israeli, not Palestinian, land that he's settling. Netanyahu demanded the full demilitarization of the proposed state, with no army, rockets, missiles, or control of its airspace, and said that Jerusalem would be undivided Israeli territory. He stated that the Palestinians should recognize Israel as the Jewish national state with an undivided Jerusalem. He rejected a right of return for Palestinian refugees, saying, "any demand for resettling Palestinian refugees within Israel undermines Israel's continued existence as the state of the Jewish people."[6]

Another controversy spawned when Netanyahu stated that he would accept a Palestinian state — but only if undivided Jerusalem remains the capital of Israel, the Palestinians disband their army and the Palestinians revoke their demand for a right of return. Highlights include two wars in Gaza, one in 2012 and another in 2014, but the most infamous is the 2014 war, where he presided over a war that publicly killed thousands of Palestinian civilians; a UN shelter was shelled despite the UN repeatedly warning Israel that it was for hospital purposes and that it had hundreds of children. [7] Even those who normally defend Israel's wars, like Joe Scarborough or Bill Maher, were taken aback at the brutality of the 2014 Gaza war.

[edit] Relationship with the United States

His personal dislike for Barack Obama is well-documented and largely mutual; despite Obama providing Israel with the Iron Dome, the most comprehensive anti-missile defense system in history, Netanyahu continues to badmouth the President on the basis of not being pro-Israeli enough. He supported Mitt Romney over Obama in 2012, and was reportedly pissed when Obama won re-election. [8]

Back in 2012, when Obama was making secret negotiations with Iran, Netanyahu threatened to attack Iran at last… and immediately backed off when Obama flatly stated that he would never support a unilateral Israeli attack on Iranian soil. Netanyahu relishes in the sheer adoration of the Republican Party to the point where he openly sides with the Republicans against Obama; John Boehner invited Netanyahu to make a speech in Congress on the month he was running for re-election, which angered Obama to the point where he boycotted the speech along with several other Democrats. He spied on the Iranian-US-EU negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program and disseminated false information to both Israeli lawmakers and American Congressmen, as a way to drum up opposition to a nuclear deal; he claims that a deal would strengthen Iran's capacity to build nukes, which is patently false. Obama had him barred from the negotiations, which later led to his speech to Congress.[9]

His vehement opposition to a Palestinian state, despite pretending that he was in favor of a two-state solution (that largely meant giving more land to Israel), has led the Obama White House to finally play hardball more publicly; they are now considering backing a UN resolution on the recognition of a Palestinian state. During the 2015 elections, he even fearmongered over Arab-Israelis being able to vote in the 2015 elections, and flatly revealed that he never wants a Palestinian state to ever exist in what he thinks is a "God-given" land to the Jews. He asserted that support of a Palestinian state is tantamount to yielding territory for radical Islamic terrorists to attack Israel.

How much has he pissed off the Americans? The White House declassified documents that detail Israel's nuclear program. [10]

It's come back to bite him in the ass. Despite winning re-election, he has yet to form a government precisely because of how toxic he's become. [11]

[edit] Footnotes

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