Netanyahu’s Speech - More Political Than Statesmanlike: Palestinian’s Enraged, More Violence

Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech at the Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Hall last weekend -Sunday, June 14- failed to offer a new diplomatic beginning for approaching the intractable conflict with the Palestinians. He finally accepted the two-state solution heavily promoted by Obama bowing under heavy pressure from Washington, but demanded that first the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state and accept that their state be demilitarized, be denied control of their air space and the right to sign military treaties. The Palestinians refugee problem must be settled outside Israel’s boundaries and Jerusalem will remain the undivided capital of Israel with religious freedom for all faiths.

The Netanyahu speech, billed as a major policy and security message, was widely expected to deliver fresh ideas or augur some breakthrough, which it did not. At the same time, analysts note, Netanyahu spelled out Israel’s conditions for peace with the Palestinians which are broadly endorsed across Israel’s political spectrum but which none of his predecessors have had the courage to put squarely on the table.

Senior Palestinian officials in Ramallah, are enraged by Netanyahu’s conditional offer of a Palestinian state - and even more by what they see as Obama’s perfidious welcome - and are weighing extreme options for reprisal including a return to violence. They accuse Obama and Netanyahu of secretly conspiring to devise a formula for trapping the Palestinians into discussing a statehood bereft of military and political power.

 Netanyahu said he would use simple language to define the conflict and his approach to peace diplomacy and proceeded to deliver a historical treatise to justify the Jewish people’s ancestral right to the land of its fathers after 2,000 years of persecution.

 He promised Israel would recognize a Palestinian national flag, government and national anthem, but was entitled to Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state with its own flag, anthem and government.

 Analysts point out that, even if by some miracle the Palestinians could be brought to accept these conditions and sign a permanent peace with Israel, their record of honoring agreements does not inspire trust. The peace framework accords signed in Oslo in 1993 were breached time and again by the Fatah leader Yasser Arafat, who doubled and tripled his armed forces, blew up Israeli buses and eventually launched the bloody Palestinian suicide campaign against Israel.

 Since then, no Israel leader has shown the necessary diplomatic skills and statesmanship for breaking the Middle East impasse. Concessions of land were never enough, as Netanyahu’s predecessors discovered. But neither are speeches. Netanyahu’s was diplomatic in the sense that it averted a painful clash with the Obama administration while keeping his right-of-center coalition government intact, but offered no practical ideas for moving forward.