Feb 14, 2017

The stand taken this week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict brings to mind the witticism of late Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, on the eve of his departure for the October 1991 Madrid Peace Conference: “The sea is the same sea, and the Arabs are the same Arabs.” In other words, only a fool would believe that the leaders of the Arab world and the PLO, who accepted the invitation of President George H.W. Bush to sit for the first time next to a Zionist leader, had come to terms with the existence of a Jewish state. And only a leftist defeatist would hand them any territories.

Netanyahu is formulating a slightly more refined version of the same approach. The prime minister argues that he does support a two-state solution, meaning the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, as he stated in his 2009 Bar-Ilan speech. But, woefully, the sea is the same sea, and the Palestinians remain the same Palestinians. At their Feb. 15 meeting in Washington, Netanyahu will try to convince his host, President Donald Trump, that those torpedoing the two-state solution are the Palestinians, who refuse to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, and not the Israelis who have been keeping them under occupation for 50 years and stealing their land.

Already in their first phone call after Trump’s victory, Netanyahu tried to convince the president-elect that the peace process is stuck because of the Palestinian refusal to pronounce the magic formula “Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people.’’ This argument is presented to conceal the fact that Netanyahu will arrive at the White House without any government mandate to present an outline for a diplomatic arrangement with the Palestinians. He did not ask of his ministers nor did he receive any approval to offer the Arab states a comprehensive deal of the sort Trump referred to in an interview with Israel Hayom published Feb. 12.

As far as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is concerned, recognizing Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people is tantamount to alienating Israel’s 1.5 million Arabs. Opposite him is Netanyahu’s coalition partner, HaBayit HaYehudi Chair Naftali Bennett, who has threatened that uttering the words “Palestinian state’’ in the Oval Office will set off a political earthquake.

Almost five years ago, in March 2012, Benny Begin, then a minister in the Netanyahu government, realized that the emperor was naked and that the “two-state solution” that the prime minister had offered was a sham. Meeting with students at the Hebrew University, Begin said the Bar-Ilan speech and the two-state concept had not even been brought up for debate by the government, nor would it be. “This is not the position of the government,” noted the Likud’s champion of democracy. “This is what enables someone like me to be a member of the government and to operate.”