Israel Matzav

Netanyahu spoke to Israel's mainstream

While I am personally to the right, and was disappointed to see Prime Minister Netanyahu call for a 'Palestinian state,' I recognize that he was speaking to Israel's consensus. I also don't regard Netanyahu's speech as being likely to bring about a 'Palestinian state.' I don't believe that the 'Palestinians' will ever agree to his conditions.

This summary from David Horovitz in Monday's JPost does a fair job of summing up why Mrs. Cohen from Hadera (the Israeli version of John Doe) will be happy with Netanyahu's speech.

In a sense, this was a classic display of Netanyahu's longstanding insistence on reciprocity. You want Israel to support statehood for the Palestinians? he was saying to the Americans. Well, then, give me the guarantees that their independence will not come at the expense of ours.

The demand can hardly strike Washington as unreasonable, and by prefacing it with that support in principle for Obama's efforts to change our region for the better, Netanyahu at a nuanced stroke lobbed the peacemaking ball back into the Palestinian court. And he moved himself a long way, if not perhaps all the way, from Obama's list of unsavory "obstacles to progress," to the place where Israel need always belong, among the potential "facilitators of progress." Over to you, Mr. Abbas.

The prime minister's refusal to halt natural growth at existing settlements still leaves him in direct conflict with Washington. But Netanyahu will have privately explained to the Americans that meeting that restriction would not merely counter his own outlook, but also doom his government, and his Sunday night mention of the Gaza disengagement served as a timely reminder of Israel's demonstrable willingness to dismantle even entire settlement communities - albeit, in Netanyahu's view, for entirely misconceived reasons.

When Israelis went to the polls in February, many in the mainstream were torn between the conviction that maintaining a Jewish, democratic Israel would require separation from the Palestinians, and the sorry assessment that no such viable separation was possible given abiding Palestinian hostility to the very notion of our sovereign presence here.

Netanyahu's Sunday night address will have resonated with that Israeli middle ground. And it also corrected some of the lacunas in the Middle East vision expressed in the US president's June 4 "new beginning" overture to the Muslim world - most especially regarding Obama's misrepresentation of Israel's legitimacy as stemming from centuries of Jewish persecution culminating in the Holocaust.

Let's see what demands for 'action' President Obama makes. Netanyahu's cabinet can still say no, and I don't see Netanyahu playing Arik Sharon and firing everyone to find ministers who will say yes.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:58 AM