‘PM should stop claims of Israel’s two-state support’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must insist that the premier American Jewish lobbying group AIPAC stop falsely stating that Israel supports a two-state solution, Samaria Regional Court head Yossi Dagan said on Thursday.
He wrote a letter to Netanyahu with this demand after seeing a brochure by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which he said falsely stated that Netanyahu had endorsed a two-state solution when he addressed the United Nations in 2018. “During his speech at the 2018 United Nations General Assembly, Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated his support for a two-state solution with Israel living peacefully with a demilitarized Palestinian state,” the AIPAC brochure states.
But the text of Netanyahu’s speech as posted on the Foreign Ministry website, does not include any reference to Palestinian statehood, but does speak of wanting to make peace with the Palestinians.
In a letter to AIPAC on the matter, Dagan wrote: “This never happened!”
He added that the “severity of this misinformation,” which was distributed to 18,000 AIPAC activists, “cannot be overstated.”
He charged that the mistake was “deliberate” and not a “typo.”
The two-state solution has been “taken off the table,” Dagan told AIPAC. He told the group, “for the sake of truth and of justice, I ask you to please, immediately discontinue this troubling conduct.”
In his letter to Netanyahu, Dagan urged the prime minister to make it clear to AIPAC officials “that if, in the name of Israel, they continue to mislead US elected officials, members of Congress and the Senate, they will have to publicly announce that they no longer represent the State of Israel in Congress.”
Earlier this week Dagan spearheaded a drive by 21 members of Knesset to members of the House of Representatives similarly stating that the government of Israel did not support a two-state solution. In the letter, the parliamentarians said they opposed the anti-BDS resolution the House approved last month because it included a statement affirming a twostate solution.
Dagan argued that the absence of any affirmative language in support of a twostate solution in the government’s policy guidelines as listed on the prime minister’s website was proof that the government opposed any such measure.
He added that it was also not the policy of the Trump administration, noting that two-state language was not included in the US National Security Strategy published in 2017.
Dagan first made a public issue of AIPAC’s promotion of two states as the official policy of the government in 2018.
Netanyahu endorsed a twostate solution in 2009 when he delivered his famous BarIlan speech and has never renounced that policy statement.
But he has, in the course of the last two elections, made statements that could be interpreted as a lack of support for two states while still leaving a window open for him to support it should he need to.
All Netanyahu’s past utterances on two states have referred to a demilitarized Palestinian state that left the IDF in control of the borders of both sovereign Israel and the Palestinian territories.