I cannot understand the hostile attitude against the new Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who says that does not accept the existence of a Palestinian state and that the new government led by hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not bound by any previous agreements.
It is true that the whole world believes that the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will only be settled through the creation of a state for the Palestinian people, who have been suffering from one of the worst forms of occupation for more than 40 years now. It is also true that the United States, Israel s blind ally, is now calling for a two-state solution. But we should not forget that a democratic election in Israel has brought Netanyahu to power and we must always accept the results of democracy.
This is what the democratic West teaches us, although it has not accepted the results of democracy when it brought to power Hamas in Gaza, the right-wing party headed by the late politician Joerg Haider in Austria and the Islamists in Algeria in the nineties.
Since Hamas, whose agenda we disagree with, won the democratic parliamentary elections in Gaza there have been attempts to boycott and topple it. The last Gaza war was nothing but a chapter in this campaign. When Haider won the Austrian elections the rest of European countries did not wait until his party assumed power, they announced in advance that they would boycott Austria if Haider took over as prime minister after winning the required majority in the elections. When the Islamists won the parliamentary elections in Algeria the election results were cancelled and reshuffled as though it was a card game.
But we must remember that Western democracy is deep-seated, and therefore has the right to accept or shun the results of democratic practices whenever it so wishes. If democracy in Austria, for instance, brought to power the leader of a right-wing party who is famous for his racist remarks against the Jews, it is the right of the rest of the democratic countries of the world to reject him and threaten Austria with boycott even though it is the same boycott criticized by those countries when exercised by Arabs against Israel. If Europe rejects the results of democracy in one of its countries then it certainly has the right to reject the results of democracy in the Arab world as well, such as in Gaza or Algeria. However, we have no right to express our rejection of the results of democracy in Israel for many reasons that I cannot enumerate, because I do not know them all.
I only know that the most important of these reasons is that Israel is an exception to which the customary international law, the agreements and the political treaties are not applicable.
The whole world can demand nuclear disarmament, for example, but it turns a blind eye to Israeli nuclear arsenal.
Therefore, Israel has the right to form a right-wing government led by a man who rejects the solution put forth by the entire world to solve the Middle East issue, namely the creation of a Palestinian state; and names as foreign minister a foolish politician who threatens a neighboring Arab state (the first to sign a peace agreement with Israel) to destroy its High Dam and cause a terrible disaster.
All this while the West expresses no reservations whatsoever about such positions that threaten world peace more than Haider could have ever done.
The Arabs have no right to reject this racist extremist government which was billed by the former foreign minister Tzipi Livni as the government of shame.
We also don t have the right to threaten to boycott this government because it came to power through democratic elections, and since we have no proven democratic experience we have no right to reject the outcome of democracy, as Western countries do, even if it was for the same reasons.
Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Arab Writers’ Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
