‘Stop Netanyahu before he gets us all killed’

FOR NEARLY 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has driven the Middle East into war and destruction.

- JEFFREY D SACHS AND SYBIL FARES

The man is a powder keg of violence. Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu has always dreamed of the big one - to defeat and overthrow the Iranian government. His long-sought war, just launched, might just get us all killed in a nuclear Armageddon unless Netanyahu is stopped.

Netanyahu’s fixation on war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin. The older generation believed that Zionists should use whatever violence — wars, assassinations, terror — is needed to achieve their aims of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.

The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, called for exclusive Zionist control over all of what had been British Mandatory Palestine. At the start of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, the Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted about 87% of the population and owned 10 times more land than the Jewish population. As of 1948, the Arabs still outnumbered the Jews roughly two to one. Nonetheless, the founding charter of Likud (1977) declared that “between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

The now infamous chant, “from the river to the sea,” which is characterised as anti-Semitic, turns out to be the anti-Palestinian rallying call of the Likud. The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist aims despite their blatant illegality under international law and morality, both of which call for a two-state solution.