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Benjamin Netanyahu Outlines Terms for a Palestinian State
DarkCrawler
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced he will back a Palestinian state - but only if it is completely demilitarised.
He said a Palestinian state must have no army, no control of its air space and no way of smuggling in weapons.
And a Palestinian state must recognise Israel as a Jewish nation, he said.
Mr Netanyahu's speech, laying out his plans for regional peace, came a month after US President Barack Obama urged him to accept a two-state solution.
The BBC's Paul Wood says Mr Netanyahu broke ground by accepting the principle of a demilitarised Palestinian state, albeit with conditions, and this will be what the White House is looking for.
But our correspondent says the question is whether this will be enough to make up for the lack of movement on the issue of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Mr Obama has stressed that he wants all settlement activity to stop.
But in his speech Mr Netanyahu said settlers were not "enemies of peace" and did not move from his position of backing "natural growth" in existing settlements.
Guarantee needed
The Israeli leader offered to talk to the Palestinians immediately and with "no preconditions".
"We want to live with you in peace as good neighbours," he said.
Mr Netanyahu also said he was willing to go to Damascus, Riyadh and Beirut in pursuit of a Middle East peace deal.
He said Israel would "be prepared for a true peace agreement [and] to reach a solution of a demilitarised Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state".
But only if "we receive this guarantee for demilitarisation and the security arrangements required by Israel, and if the Palestinians recognise Israel as the nation of the Jewish people".
Well, it's a big start certainly, even with the whole settlement issue. I disagree with him on that, but it's good to see that there is some progress with the peace dealings.
What do you think? Can this start working? Will the settlements forever stand in the way of peace or will the settlers or the Palestinians give up on that issue?
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It's a rhetorical bone being thrown to Obama, but unless I'm misreading the situation (and Israel/Palestine has been stroked into a frenzy of hanging on every shade of meaning in every word) this is a bid for time and to change the framing of the issue to take pressure off Israel from the US more than any kind of actual meaningful concession or legitimate attempt to advance the process.
The usual Jewish hawks in the US have been trying to bring pressure to bear inside the US too, and for a change of pace have actually been almost completely unsuccessful. The attempts to start up a campaign against Donna Edwards (among the more progressive on the issue) got shut down almost immediately when J Street (the liberal Israel lobby) raised $15K for her overnight.
Once Netanyahu was faced with a president who actually meant what he said about holding Israel to the terms of their agreements, a Congress who supported the president, and either marginalized or ineffectual internal US political support he had no choice but to make some sort of concession. The problem being he's leading a coalition of the right and far right and anything substantive would be more likely than not to break his coalition. So Netanyahu is trying to thread the needle of saying just enough in just the right way to give his political support here in the US the leverage to get Israel back in the right and make Palestine the unreasonable ones in the mainstream eye without actual doing anything that might lead to any deviation from the hard right line.
Netanyahu is basically saying that there can be a sovereign Palestinian state only so long as it gives up one of the main hallmarks of sovereignty.
No, because I refuse to see Bibi as either Lelouch or Schnizel.
The audience isn't really Obama. It's the MSM by way of the K Street lobby and neocons, the people who outright support Netanyahu's hardline positions. You can't get away with advocating that at the moment though, so the entire point is to put enough BS out there that your allies can spin it into Israel making concessions and taking the moral high ground and the Palestinians being in the wrong and the problem again. If you can win that argument you can get back to the business of pressuring Congress to pressure Obama to back off not because he isn't right but because it isn't worth the political capital to continue the fight when he has other things he needs to do.
The "we will talk without preconditions" part? look to that being played up bigtime.
Also, on the army issue...I agree that they should have their own, but does anyone have the power or the capability to make Israel agree on such terms? Even if they were right? I mean, look at the settlement issue. How can anyone stop them except the goverment of Israel? How far does the international community need to go to make Israel agree to any decision? Sanctions? (which I would totally agree on but how probable would those be?)
In the short term, there's nothing that could be realistically be done to make Israel, or any other country for that matter, do something they don't want to do. Short of regime change, which is thankfully off the table for the next 15-20 years.
Over the longer term, the model to look at would be South Africa. It would take a period of pressure for years, not weeks or months, to force real concessions and even then it would take not just political pressure but a cutting off of support and civilian economic action to the point where continued resistance was untenable. All of which would require a delicate balancing act because while South Africa was a strategically insignificant country with minimal political connection in the US Israel is a strong ally in a region we continue to care deeply about with massive domestic political pull.
Actually, that is an interesting question. Do you honestly think this Israeli government would actually negotiate with the elected leadership in Palestine, and if they did do you think it would be in good faith? I can't say I'd accept either premise, but I'd like to hear arguments to the contrary.
Sigh.
The Israeli government has previously shown willingness to trade land for the land the settlements reside on. Depending on what's offered, I can see that working.
Take a look at where the settlements are. Then take a look at the rivers and highlands in those areas. You'll see a pattern.
I am curious, however, to see if this is an evolution in Netanyahu's earlier visions of Palestinian "sovereignty." He's always believed in the "restricted sovereignty model" by which the Palestinian state would not be able to raise/maintain its own army, control its airspace, control its electromagnetic spectrum (i.e. Israel could jam communications at any time), or control its own borders. Additionally, he's previously insisted that Israel should retain control of over 50% of the West Bank (the Jordan Valley and the Judean Desert) as a security zone.
Does this announcement mean he's given up on the electromagnetic spectrum and security zone? Not bloody likely. I agree with everyone else here: this looks like Netanyahu trying to manipulate US opinion without substantively changing Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. He may say he's now for the two-state solution—and this would be a big deal if it was true—but his words demonstrate otherwise.
The only settlements Israel has outright withdrawn from are in Gaza. Wich quite frankly is a garbage dump with people living in it even before the last "security" sweep.
The ones in the West Bank where small and unimportant.
Several previous offers from Israel (camp David being the most famous) have offered to trade land in such a manner.
Let's see: in 2005, Israel attempted a "land for peace"-type deal in Gaza, evicting around 8,000 settlers. That same year, they surreptitiously expanded and consolidated West Bank territory, with over 9000 (hyuk) new residents mysteriously appearing there— one of the largest settler population surges the West Bank has ever seen.
8000 settlers leave Gaza... 9000 take up residence in the West Bank... yeah, certainly doesn't seem like the Israeli government was offering the evicted Gaza settlers land in the West Bank. And I can't imagine that any rational-minded Palestinian would ever suspect them of doing such a thing.
Israel has been known to use "land for peace" as a cover—give the Arabs some land, then steal more land elsewhere. Most Americans only get the first part—"But ChopperDave, the Israelis tried land for peace in Gaza, and it didn't work!"—and never realize what is actually happening on the ground.
The Palestinians do notice these things, however, and as you can imagine it makes them pretty damn cynical towards Israeli peace overtures. In order for the Palestinians to buy into "land for peace"—really, in order for them to buy into any sort of peace plan—they're going to need some guarantee that the Israelis won't use the peace process as a diplomatic cover while they continue to do shady, illegal shit.
Basically.
Read again. I was talking about land for land, not land for peace.
I think that would basically amount to Palestinians getting Israel's garbage land, and retaining all the good land — i.e. water accessible, farmable, etc.
Not to mention that the settlers are hardly contiguous. If the Palestinians negotiated those away, they'd end up with territory that looked essentially like a checkerboard.
There's no getting around it: the settlements are going to have to go if a two-state solution is going to be negotiated.
Camp David(2000) was fucking bullshit and everyone knows it. Ehud Barak even says so in his memoirs(though not as bluntly). The offer you talk about was never even put into writing. Most of the bad rep the Palestinians get for rejecting it, comes from Israeli-friendly media and self-serving politicans.
Why Is Netanyahu even prime minister of Israel? It was his goverment from 95-99 that screwed the Oslo treaty beyond repair in the first place. Expanding Settlments and imposing impossible conditions for continued negotiation.
Thats why his offer is such a gyp. He is not making concessions to the palestinians. He is stoping making outrageous demands of them.
It already does. If Israel offers land along the southern border, connecting the West bank and Gaza, they'd probably take it as long as the treaty put Jerusalem on the border between the nations.
His party came in second and several traditionally allied parties with heavy demographic appeal won enough for him to form a majority coalition.
I would take it more seriously if part of the deal included having the UN send in peacekeepers, so that they could take the place of internal security for the Palestinians. Maybe if Netanyahu alters the deal to something along those lines, it will have more legitimacy.
He isn't.