Yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he had told US diplomats of his opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state after the present war in Gaza. The Israeli Prime Minister said that “in any future arrangement […] Israel needs security control over all territory west of the River Jordan. This collides with the idea of [Palestinian] sovereignty.” He added that the Americans were aware of his view, and that “the Prime Minister needs to be capable of saying no to our friends.”
This directly contradicts many of his previous public statements on the issue. In 2009, during a speech at Bar-Ilan University, Netanyahu spoke of his desire to see “two free nations side by side”; in 2013, at the same university, he outlined his acceptance of a demilitarised Palestinian state.
In 2015, Netanyahu told the United Nations that he supported “the vision of two states for two peoples”, and in another speech to the UN the following year he claimed he had “not given up on peace” and remained “committed to a vision of peace based on two states for two peoples”.
Both critics and supporters of Netanyahu responded sceptically to these statements — not least because, the Bar-Ilan speeches excepted, they were usually made in English to an overseas audience, and not intended to be heard or believed by his domestic political base. The Israeli Left assumed he was lying and understood that there could be no “two state solution” with Bibi as prime minister; the Right likewise saw these as meaningless words and were not worried that he actually meant what he said. Across the political spectrum, it was universally assumed that he was doing it to placate the Americans.
This adds extra significance to yesterday’s remarks: that Netanyahu is overtly stating his opposition to a Palestinian state and pointedly adding that he has informed the US of this suggests that he is no longer interested in maintaining his previous façade.
Although it goes almost unreported in the West, for several decades now the Israeli Right has been arguing that the country should openly depart from US policy and break free from American influence — even if this means risking the $3.3 billion in military aid that Israel receives annually from the US. This feeling has broadened with the increasing importance of the settler movement to Right-wing politics in Israel, many of whom are religious fundamentalists and scriptural literalists who argue that they do not need the USA as God is on their side.
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