As I told you, the Palestinian unrest mihght soon be handled the "Grozny way"....
Bullyboy of Israeli Politics Blusters His Way to Sharon Cabinet Post
Lee Hockstader Washington Post Service Tuesday, March 6, 2001
JERUSALEM It raises the faintest of smiles on Avigdor Lieberman's lips to be asked why so many Israelis are afraid of him.
He savors the question for a moment, hauls a fistful of pea pods from a huge plastic bag on his desk, empties one of them with his teeth and then answers matter-of-factly.
"First of all, they are right to be afraid," said Mr. Lieberman, a hard-line nationalist who recently warned Iran, Egypt and Lebanon that Israel would not hesitate to bomb them if provoked. "Most people on the political right, they have a lot of good slogans. They're good talkers. But when they take power they don't do anything. But I'm different: I can deliver the goods and the slogans in a practical way."
That prospect is precisely what frightens some Israelis most. A burly Russian immigrant who once worked as a nightclub bouncer, Mr. Lieberman is the bullyboy of Israeli politics. A tough-talking operator, often in trouble with the law, he delights in berating many groups - Arabs, Jewish peace activists and even the police - on the floor of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament.
Now he may have an opportunity to turn talk into action. Last week, Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon appointed Mr. Lieberman national infrastructures minister in the incoming government, repaying his help in rallying the support of Russian immigrant voters.
Even in a cabinet that will have a distinct right-wing cast, Mr. Lieberman, 42, will occupy the farthest right-wing niche. He disdains diplomacy as an instrument in dealing with the Arabs and rejects the notion that negotiations are the key to security. If he has any strategic doctrine, it is that Israel should dispense with the idea of "proportionate response" and deal with any enemy provocation by pulverizing the Arabs.
His blunt pronouncements on war, peace and realpolitik are so politically incorrect that one popular television mimic portrays a feral Mr. Lieberman as Mr. Sharon's barking, snarling bodyguard. But they are also spectacularly popular with the constituents of his Russian-speaking immigrants' party, Israel B'Aitainu, or Israel Is Our Home.
"To say there is no military solution to the conflict is really nonsense," Mr. Lieberman said in an interview. "There's only one way to achieve peace - to be strong, to be tough."
Mr. Sharon's aides play down Mr. Lieberman's views. But as Israel reels from suicide bombings, sniper attacks and drive-by shootings, Mr. Lieberman's rhetoric may become increas- ingly appealing. That is the fear of the Israeli left."He's a very intelligent guy, very sophisticated, but his view of the world is very dangerous," said a top aide to Prime Minister Ehud Barak. "He sees everything in dark colors. He's a doomsday guy."
Mr. Lieberman will likely be on a collision course with more moderate members of the new governing coalition, such as Shimon Peres, the Nobel peace laureate who will be foreign minister. Mr. Lieberman once likened Mr. Peres, chief architect of the Oslo peace plan, to Marshal Philippe Petain, the French collaborator with Nazi Germany.
If Mr. Lieberman has been harsh on the subject of Israeli peace activists, he has treated Arab Israeli representatives in the Knesset with open contempt. He has labeled them traitors, urged that they be stripped of Israeli citizenship and called them, collectively, the Knesset's "terror department." He recently attacked one Arab lawmaker, who had expressed sympathy for the Palestinians, in a fashion that evoked his own roots in the former Soviet Union, where he lived until he was 20.
"In a Communist country they would've put you in front of a firing squad," he told Mohammed Barakei.
The son of a department store manager, Mr. Lieberman was born in Moldova, then a republic of the Soviet Union, and came to Israel with his parents in 1978. He arrived speaking almost no Hebrew, but within a couple of years was an organizer for the Likud party while still a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
After years as a low-ranking party worker, he was discovered by Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Likud prime minister, who made Mr. Lieberman his chief of staff. His brief tenure in that job was stormy, marked mainly by police investigations of allegations that Mr. Lieberman was corrupt. Mr. Lieberman fought back with a vengeance - at one point he called a top Jewish police official "an anti-Semitic racist" - and none of the charges stuck.
Mr. Lieberman is against giving back Israeli-occupied land to the Palestinians. For him, it is personal as well as political: Nokdim, the tiny, remote West Bank settlement where he lives south of Jerusalem, would probably be among the first abandoned by Israel in any comprehensive peace deal.
Better, he thinks, to reinvade some Palestinian land.
"If they want terror and war, we'll give them terror and war," he said. "If it's peace, then it's peace. But no democratic country can accept a war of attrition."
"They must understand we're willing to pay any cost to provide security," he said.
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