Bruce Bisset: A tantrum of biblical proportions

Bruce Bisset.

It's hard not to see some of the world's more demonstrative leaders as children in adult bodies, still using the same self-serving immoral tactics to boss their citizens, and those of other countries, as they did when first they practised politics in the playpen.

The US leader-elect and the Israeli Prime Minister are cases in point. But where Donald Trump is one of those tell-tale bullies who pretends secret knowledge to coerce, Benjamin Netanyahu is an out-and-out tantrum tyrant as likely to poke your eye out with a stick as look at you.

Both are dangerous, not least because their countries possess nuclear arsenals and could spark an end to civilisation as we know it.

Who knows? If The Donald and his fundamentalist clique run to form, he and "Bibi" could well turn up the flames burning throughout the Middle East from blazing to inferno.

Indeed, Netanyahu seems capable of doing that all on his own.

Let's face it, Israel is as much a rogue state as North Korea. It doesn't give tuppence for international law and refuses to negotiate in good faith, wanting instead to beat its enemies into submission first so as to be mock-gracious in offering crumbs. This has been the thrust of its foreign policy since its formation in 1948; essentially, a stance of might is right.

To date, Israel has played that card pretty well, gaining military successes against all its Arab neighbours including various pieces of their lands, some of which (like Sinai) it later gave back, others (such as the West Bank) which it has kept.

Or more precisely, kept occupied, for Israel did not formally annex it after the 1967 war; but despite the West Bank is acknowledged as Palestinian territory, has continued to treat it as its own.

This is part of what sets Israel's leadership against the international community: That they allocate and encourage settlements by Israelis on land in the West Bank; land that is stolen, at gunpoint, from its legal Palestinian owners.

That's directly at odds with the protocols of the 4th Geneva Convention, which states that a state occupying another's territory must not shift its citizens into settlements in such territory.

Some 360,000 Israelis now live in occupied West Bank settlements, built for their purposes, and around two-thirds the total land area has been allocated to Israelis. Illegally.

This is the issue addressed in UN resolution 2334, co-sponsored by New Zealand and passed by a vote of 14-0, with one (US) abstention, by the Security Council just before Christmas. Yet that resolution does not call for an Israeli withdrawal as such; it merely calls on Israel to cease what it is doing and get back into honest negotiations toward achieving a two-state (Israel and Palestine) solution.

That Netanyahu immediately not only rejected the resolution out of hand, but told Foreign Minister Murray McCully that for New Zealand to co-author it was tantamount to a declaration of war, shows its true intent in spades.

Note that I have made no mention of religion, or the competing historic claims all three Abrahamic faiths have on the land in question. Nor have I mentioned the humanitarian crisis that is Gaza, nor the fact that for every Israeli killed in this interminable conflict, five Palestinians die and that's just the official "terror" count.

Because, in terms of international law, those are irrelevant to the settlement issue.
Israel is a rogue state that stands rightly condemned by the United Nations, yet refuses to change its ways; even though that invites the prospect of endless war.

We should have no sympathy whatsoever for their cause.