Friday, March 27th 2009, 4:00 AM
With Benjamin Netanyahu set to become Israel's prime minister, critics around the world are proclaiming the death of the peace process. And the fact that Avigdor Lieberman - who has called for all Israeli citizens (not just Arabs) to swear a loyalty oath and supports population transfers with the Palestinians - may become Israel's foreign minister has only exacerbated the fervor of these predictions.
In this analysis, it is the incoming conservative government of Israel which poses a threat to regional stability, not Palestinian rejectionism or the machinations of Iran and Syria and their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. The height of this thinking was apparent at Tuesday night's White House press conference, when Agence France-Presse reporter Stefan Collison asked President Obama, "How realistic do you think those hopes [for Middle East peace] are now, given the likelihood of a prime minister who is not fully signed up to a two-state solution and a foreign minister who has been accused of insulting Arabs?"
When was the last time a journalist asked the leader of a democratic country whether Muslim states' not being "fully signed up" to the existence of Israel and having ministers in its employ who "insult" Jews threatened Middle East peace?
Examples of such anti-Jewish hatred abound. Mustafa Tlass, who served as Syria's defense minister for many years, once published a book alleging that Jews use the blood of Gentile children to make their unleavened bread. The Iranian government promotes Holocaust denial. Turn on state-sponsored television throughout the Muslim world and you're bound to see the most outrageous slanders about Jews, plenty of them aimed at impressionable children.
It's worth pointing out here that the people decrying the new Israeli government are the same ones who constantly call for the United States and Israel to "engage" with every rogue state and terrorist outfit in the region. If the Syrian Ba'ath Party, Hamas' Islamists and the mullahs of Tehran are all worthy of our engagement, surely we can deal with the likes of Netanyahu and Lieberman.
Of course Israel should be held to a higher standard because it's a democracy. And Israel's worst tendencies - its insularity, its indifference to the plight of its Arab citizenry - are embodied in the thuggish Lieberman.
But whatever his faults, Lieberman is hardly as extreme as the people with whom Israel must one day make peace. He does not advocate the destruction of Iran, as its leaders do of Israel.
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