Netanyahu’s words
The document drafted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and revealed in Haaretz on Sunday (“Netanyahu offered Herzog to push together for regional peace – and then backtracked,” Barak Ravid), is good news for Israelis who believe in the two-state solution.
The document was intended to enable the formation of a unity government with the Labor Party, in order to kick off a regional peace agreement. From the document it emerges that Netanyahu supports a diplomatic solution that involves a territorial compromise, recognizes the Palestinian people and its right to self-determination, and understands that Israel must halt the expanding settlement enterprise. It also indicates that Netanyahu takes a positive view of the Arab peace initiative’s general spirit.
Netanyahu’s declaration reveals that the prime minister and his main, vocal coalition partner, Habayit Hayehudi, which supports annexing the occupied territories, have a vast ideological difference. Habayit Hayehudi members are taking advantage of this gap to carry out a deceitful publicity campaign claiming that the public consensus has given up on the two-state solution and instead dreams of annexation and a single nation with two legal systems.
In the past few years, a poor political culture has developed in Israel, under which political parties must lie about their true diplomatic stances. The memory of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination is effective deterrence for anyone who considers challenging this conception. It seems that the partnership between Likud and Habayit Hayehudi is also based on this kind of lie.
A destructive dynamic is created as a result: The settlers’ party drags the government to the right, while the party in charge is forced to prove via laws and declarations that it is more right-wing, more extreme, more aggressive and even more racist. The meaning of this is that a party with only eight Knesset seats, representing a population that largely if not entirely lives in territory outside the State of Israel’s sovereignty, is dictating a tragic, historic direction, in keeping with its own interests, which are contrary to the interests of the public at large living within Israel.