THE REAL SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP


Last week saw President Obama visit the UK, well London to be precise, and gave a speech in Westminster Hall to a session of both houses of the House of Commons. The speech, dripping with honeyed phrases, beautifully delivered, wooed the assembled parliamentarians who swooned like schoolgirls experiencing their first teenage crush as he extolled the wonders of the ‘special relationship.’

Meanwhile across the Atlantic another speech was made, again to assembled parliamentarians, this speech was also declaiming a special relationship, though this time with a little more veracity. Benjamin Netanyahu* was addressing Congress, an occasion greeted with a fervour falling just a little short of that which might greet the second coming.
This speech was an impressive affair; this was a man who knew how, in the vernacular, to ‘press all the right buttons.’ Indeed for anyone who knew nothing of the facts on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank, i.e. your average Congressman, you would have believed that Netanyahu was a tireless campaigner for peace, yearning only for a just and equitable settlement with the Palestinians. So came the standing ovations, I lost count, though they would have done credit to a Stalinist apparatchik. There was however giveaways, no West Bank, only Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem off limits, right of return for refugees, forget it. Still the applause echoed around Capitol Hill. He completed his speech and descended into the welcoming embrace of an enraptured Congress. Be under no illusion wherein the special relationship lies

*http://cspan.org/Events/Israeli-Prime-Minister-Addresses-Congress/1

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