Lieberman eyes Netanyahu's seat, keeping all options on the table

[Jefferson23]

At the moment, Lieberman's ultimate goal – to merge his Yisrael Beiteinu party with Likud in order to pave his way to the premiership - is encountering serious obstacles. But there are three ways he could achieve it.

By Yossi Verter | Jan. 9, 2014 |

Avigdor Lieberman’s speech this week at the annual gathering of Israeli ambassadors made headlines mainly because of what it contained: a warm embrace of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for his indefatigable efforts to bring the sides together, and also the foreign minister’s declaration of his readiness to demarcate Israel’s border in the final-status agreement “near Route 6,” with Arab locales in the Triangle and in Wadi Ara becoming part of a future Palestinian state.

But what was not contained in Lieberman’s speech? A rejection of the term “1967 lines”; opposition to the evacuation of settlements; and insistence on the indivisibility of Jerusalem and on an ongoing Israeli presence in the Jordan Rift Valley. It’s not surprising, then, that President Shimon Peres termed Lieberman the “responsible adult” after meeting with him privately. Peres views the population-exchange initiative as totally off the wall, but other things he apparently heard from Lieberman prompted the president to effuse about him to the country’s top diplomats.

Along the way, the president also enjoyed annoying the prime minister as part of the ongoing cold war between the two. Because if Lieberman is the new responsible adult, and Peres is, as everyone knows, the responsible adult par excellence – where does that leave Benjamin Netanyahu? Indeed, the next day Netanyahu told the Likud Knesset faction that the only way to prevent Israel’s transformation into a binational state is the division of the country. In the same breath, however, the premier declared that he will oppose evacuation of settlements that are not in the big blocs but are “important to the Jewish people,” such as Hebron and Beit El. Let’s see him reach an agreement that leaves Hebron and Beit El in Israeli hands.

Lieberman’s map has been known for more than a decade. He wrote about it in a book titled “My Truth.” Yet his flirtation with the Americans was music to the ears of Israel’s ambassadors worldwide, who did not have an easy time under the foreign minister in the past four years. The relatively moderate model and conciliatory face that Lieberman presented the world this week prove, and not for the first time, that the man is blessed with extraordinary conceptual elasticity. If his flexibility of thought were to be translated into the physical realm, he could easily turn into a sort of rubber doll, stuff himself whole into a medium-sized suitcase and close the zipper from the inside.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/.premium-1.567816

[global1]

1. Phew!!!! - I Thought You Meant Joe......nt

[Jefferson23]

2. Joe is doing his thing, pushing for military might as typical of him:

snip* After leaving office, Lieberman continued his foreign policy advocacy by joining the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he co-chairs with former Senator Kyl its American Internationalism Project, a purportedly cross-party initiative meant “to rebuild and reshape a bipartisan consensus around American global leadership and engagement.”[1] Wrote one commentator: “Lieberman, a preeminent neocon, should feel right at home there. There is nothing remotely bipartisan about his views. They are those of an unreconstructed neocon. His tenure at AEI will allow him to continue to pontificate to a sympathetic audience about why he regards even mild opposition to his intransigent bellicosity as benighted obstructionism.”[2]

Syria and Iran Policy

During his final term in the Senate, Lieberman was a vocal advocate for U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war. In an August 2012 Washington Post op-ed coauthored with McCain and fellow hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Lieberman called for the United States to arm select Syrian opposition groups and to provide air support for so-called “humanitarian safe zones” on Syria’s borders, despite arguments from many analysts that Syria’s conflict increasingly resembled a sectarian civil war and may have been infiltrated by foreign jihadists. “The U.S. reluctance to intervene in Syria is, first of all, allowing this conflict to be longer and bloodier, a radicalizing dynamic,” they wrote. “Contrary to critics who argue that a greater U.S. role in Syria could empower al-Qaeda, it is the lack of strong U.S. assistance to responsible fighters inside the country that is ceding the field to extremists there.”[3]

Earlier that year, McCain and Lieberman made a surprise visit to Free Syrian Army fighters on the Turkish border, where they declared that the conflict could only be resolved militarily. “Diplomacy with Assad has failed,” they said in a statement, “and it will continue to fail so long as Assad thinks he can defeat the opposition in Syria militarily.”[4]

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/lieberman_joe