Oooooh, looks pretty good! (Feel free to write me to ask how to do it!)

Anyway, the immediate point of that piece is contained in its title: Israeli government announces that it wants to relaunch construction in East Jerusalem. The Netanyahu government had previously conceded a brief suspension of such construction, but only as a sort of fig-leaf measure in response to heavy pressure it was getting from the US – because, of course, any such construction in East Jerusalem, territory conquered in battle that the rest of the world will not concede is owned by Israel in any way, sounds the death-knell for what are supposed to be peace negotiations with Palestinian representatives.

Well, there’s no more need for any of that, or at least that seems to be the calculation of the Israeli cabinet. The main protagonist here according to the Le Monde piece is Interior Minister Elie Yishai, leader of the Shas party – that’s the ultra-Orthodox party, governing in coalition with Netanyahu’s party and some others, which advocates “Greater Israel.” So no surprise there. What is surprising, though, are some of the official statements accompanying this announcement, at least for those unacquainted with the time-honored Yiddish concept of chutzpah. Here’s Yishai:

I intend to convene as rapidly as possible the commission for planning and construction in Jerusalem to relaunch construction at Ramat Shlomo [an East Jerusalem neighborhood, mostly inhabited by Orthodox Jews]. But this time the discussions will not take place during visits to Israel by American officials.

Here Yishai is clearly referring to the visit to Israel at the beginning of March by US Vice President Joseph Biden, which was what caused all that annoying trouble about this construction work and the Israeli government’s decision to briefly suspend it, and all the rest. See what I’m saying about chutzpah? Who does Biden think he is?

Yishai went on:

The Israeli government has never yielded and will never yield in the face of the United States and will continue to construct everywhere in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people for eternity.

Okaaay . . . Uh, hello? Are there any grownups there? Anyone?

Looks like there’s nobody. The best supplementary statement to this that Le Monde’s/AFP’s reporters were able to get was from Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon of the Yisrael Beitenu party, also in coalition with Netanyahu and also rather hard-line: what Yishai said in fact is “the official position of the government: no one can stop construction in Jerusalem.”

There you go, Barack Obama and Mahmoud Abbas. I know you gentlemen have a lot on your plates these days – particularly you, Mr. President – but what are you going to do about this?

                          

That hardly means that German government officials are not welcome to conduct official visits to Israel, of course, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier did that earlier this week on Monday. Because Steinmeier is at the same time SPD candidate for Chancellor in the upcoming September elections, this was probably the last time he is to visit Israel (and Syria, and Lebanon) in that capacity. Still, in retrospect, the timing for the visit seems most unfortunate: on the one hand the topics for discussion could not help but include Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank, which the US and Europe want Israel to put a much-tighter leash on (and that for starters), while on the other Netanyahu has lately been acting like the pressure is really getting to be too much for him – for example, as recounted in a report picked up on Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, calling both Rahm Emanuel (President Obama’s chief-of-staff) and David Axelrod (his senior political adviser) “self-hating Jews.”

Sure enough, as we learn in an account in Der Spiegel by Yassin Musharbash (How Netanyahu startled Steinmeyer with a Nazi concept), the explosion duly arrived.

Granted, it only occurred in closed, private discussions, so we only know about it from comments to Reuters by what Der Spiegel terms an Ohrenzeuge, i.e. a witness who at least heard the exchange, but it was still a rather ugly incident nonetheless. Netanyahu, while arguing with Steinmeier over the West Bank settlements, is said by this witness to have declared that “Judea and Samaria [the preferred right-wing Israeli terms for the West Bank] cannot be judenrein.” Oooh, bad move: judenrein is a very loaded term, straight from Nazi times, meaning “cleansed of Jews” and it is what the Nazis publicly aspired to make all of Europe. How did Steinmeier react? He kept his cool: as the Witness puts it, “What could he do? He basically nodded.” But, as the Spiegel author makes clear, you could really tell something had gone wrong when the two men emerged after that meeting to talk to the press: the atmosphere and body-language between them was cold in the extreme.

Soon, however, word got out, and many Israelis were rather shocked by this transparent attempt to equate Palestinian-Israeli relations to the Nazi treatment of the European Jews. Ex-Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami told Der Spiegel that he considered any such comparison “fundamentally false and simply unnecessary.” Salman Schoval, former Israeli ambassador to the US (and also N.B. a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party) said “I don’t like transferring Nazi-concepts onto others, even if they are our enemies.” On the other hand, an anonymous diplomat (the article doesn’t say whether he is Israeli or not) maintained that Netanyahu needs to use “drastic rhetoric” like this in order to appease those in his governing coalition who are even more hard-line about the settlements, for whom he has already gone to far in conceding the concept of a Palestinian state.

The thing is, this Witness also let Reuters know that Netanyahu has instructed his cabinet to employ this same “concept” (Begriff) when called upon to defend the West Bank settlements in the future. Did he mean the specific, loaded word judenrein? Are we going to encounter that again – and/or other Nazi-type language – so that this sort of scandal will shortly reappear and escalate even more? Has the Netanyahu government already adopted such an obstinate and shameless attitude as that (including, mind you, towards its friends and allies, led by the USA which pays from $3-5 billion to Israel each year)?