Martin Sherman has written a provocative article which appeared in Arutz-7 on November 25, 2016. The article bears the title “Benjamin Netanyahu – A synopsis: The good the bad…and the remarkable.” Sherman offers a brief survey of Mr. Netanyahu’s long and punctuated reign as Israel’s Prime Minister (1995 to the present). Unfortunately, the otherwise astute Sherman, a political scientist, has given us an article that contains at least three egregious omissions concerning Netanyahu.

To be fair, let us first note that during much of Netanyahu’s reign, Bibi faced the hostility of President Barack Obama. This milquetoast Muslim one may arguably deem the most pernicious ideological enemy of Israel to occupy the White House. But let’s examine some of Netanyahu’s flaws unmentioned by Sherman.

Netanyahu won’t abrogate Oslo

First, contrary to the position of many Knesset Members, Netanyahu has doggedly opposed abrogating the Oslo or Israel-PLO Agreement of 1993. He has ignored its constant violation by the PLO-Palestinian Authority, whose terrorist minions have murdered more than 1,000 Jewish men, women, and children, and have maimed, terrorized, and traumatized many thousands more.

23 years of failure

Second, that Netanyahu has genuflected to the Oslo Agreement for 23 years despite its patent failure to bring peace, or even offer a reasonable expectation that it will eventuate in peace, testifies to an abysmal lack of common sense and moral sensibility on the part of Mr. Netanyahu. It doesn’t require great wisdom to recognize that the Muslims of the Palestinian Authority – i.e., the disciples of Muhammad – cannot make peace with Israel without renouncing their 1,400 year religion. To do so would arouse the violent ideological as well as political hostility of the entire Islamic world, a world that consists not only of 1.5 billion believers. This mass of people dwells in fifty Islamic countries whose power structure stands or falls on the “faithful,” their belief in Mohammad, the messenger of Allah!

Notice, however, that Mr. Netanyahu persists in the so-called peace process as if he were oblivious of this vital and irrevocable fact about the Israel-Palestinian/Muslim conflict.

The Wye Memorandum

Third, this ostensible oblivion of Netanyahu showed itself in his signing the October 28, 1998 Wye Memorandum, of which the United States was a guarantor. This Memorandum, in pursuance of the Oslo Agreement, required Israel to surrender parts of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority, qualified by security provisions concerning Muslim terrorism.

Despite the PA’s countless violations of these security provisions, Mr. Netanyahu has never issued a formal public complaint to the United States about those violations. Nor has he taken firm and unremitting counter measures. Netanyahu’s passivity or appeasement, is a carbon copy of his blasé attitude toward the PLO-PA’s violation of the Oslo Agreement. The Netanyahu-led government of Israel has thus made Jewish blood cheap.

Netanyahu has suffered from a long-standing intellectual flaw: an inability to take the murderous nature of Islam seriously. Netanyahu unwittingly revealed this mental defect shortly after his initial ascendancy as Israel’s Prime Minister. Thus. in a speech to a joint session of the United States Congress on July 10,1996, Netanyahu said this about the Arab-Muslims comprising the Palestinian Authority:

We have no quarrel with them which cannot be resolved by peaceful means. Nor, I must say, do we have a quarrel with Islam. We reject the thesis of an inevitable clash of civilizations. We do not subscribe to the idea that Islam has replaced Communism as the new rival of the West, because our conflict is specific. It is with those militant fanatics who pervert the central tenets of a great faith towards violence and world domination. Our hand is stretched in peace to all who would grasp it. We don’t care about their religion. We don’t care about their national identity. We don’t care about their ideological belief. We care about peace, and our hand is stretched out to peace.

No peace with those who do not want it

This verbiage was vintage Bibi or “political correctness.” It is sheer obfuscation, indeed, a gratuitous falsehood—a lie. This lie has plagued Israel for two decades. Furthermore it continues to mislead countless Jews and non-Jews throughout the world, and with bloody consequences! This is the lie that I personally urged Shimon Peres to undo in a meeting I had with him in the Knesset back in 1976, a meeting arranged by my acquaintance (and later friend) Lt. Gen. Chaim Laskov, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces.

Mr. Sherman’s article is silent about Netanyahu’s obscurantism regarding the Arab-Muslim Palestinians. This may stem from Netanyahu’s political timidity. But that in turn reveals the lack of political creativity or statecraft typical of Israel’s political leaders and university-educated advisers. ☼