March 8, 2015

'A Fight Against the Creation of a Palestinian State'

Mr. Netanyahu made a blatant appeal for votes from the right wing.

In a newsletter distributed in synagogues on March 7, a Likud leader wrote that the prime minister had declared the Bar-Ilan speech “null and void,” and that his “entire political biography is a fight against the creation of a Palestinian state.”

When Israeli reporters inquired as to whether Mr. Netanyahu was, in fact, reversing his Bar-Ilan stance, Likud said the next day via the messaging app WhatsApp: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that in the situation that has been created in the Middle East, any area that will be cleared will be grabbed by radical Islam and the terror organizations supported by Iran. Therefore, there will be no withdrawals and no concessions. This thing is simply not relevant.”

But when the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz published an article saying that Mr. Netanyahu had declared the Bar-Ilan speech irrelevant, the prime minister’s office insisted that he had “never stated such a thing.”

