Why Netanyahu remains Israel’s ‘inciter-in-chief’

JONATHAN COOK – The National

An 18-year-old art student in Jerusalem discovered the hard way this month that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t care for irony.

For a class assignment, she took the famous Barack Obama “Hope” poster and changed the face to Mr Netanyahu’s, next to a noose, with the word “Rope” replacing “Hope”. The student wanted to portray the prime minister as a hangman, who extinguishes hope of peace with incitement and political repression.

The Israeli police and Mr Netanyahu, however, viewed the work not as a critique of incitement but as an example of it – with the noose intended for the prime minister. The student is now the subject of a well-publicised investigation.

As with most art, context is everything. For Israelis on the left, as well as Israel’s minority of Palestinian citizens, Mr Netanyahu is considered the king of incitement. And in recent weeks he has lived up to his reputation.

The background to the hangman image is Mr Netanyahu’s incitement against former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in the mid-1990s, as the latter tried to drum up support for the Oslo Accords. Footage of the period shows Mr Netanyahu addressing crowds holding aloft placards of Rabin in Nazi uniform. Months later a right-wing activist shot Rabin dead in the centre of Tel Aviv.

Mr Netanyahu’s current conduct has revived those memories, leading another former prime minister, Ehud Barak, to label him Israel’s “inciter-in-chief”.

Heading the list of targets has been the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian. Mr Netanyahu lost no time in blaming them for the forest fires that raged across Israel last month. He and other ministers referred to an “arson intifada” and “pyro-terrorism”, though experts attributed the blazes to months of drought, high winds and a lack of preparedness.

Weeks later, no one has been charged with politically motivated arson. Nonetheless, Mr Netanyahu has not retracted his incendiary finger-pointing.

In the parliament, the prime minister has led a boycott of the Joint List, a coalition of Palestinian parties, after they refused to attend the funeral of former president Shimon Peres.

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