When I was in Gaza, Norman Finkelstein called Netanyahu a "truck driver." He was referring to Netanyahu's lack of grace, and absence of literary sensibility. At Huffpo, Daniel Levy echoes the thought in describing Netanyahu's "baby step":
Even the historical and biblical quotes were of the predictable and
plodding kind, it lacked grandeur or any sense of occasion. More
importantly, it was also a mean-spirited, often petty and parochial
speech in its substance, "a speech without a gram of nobility," as
commentator Ofer Shelach wrote in Ma'ariv.
Israel has just lived through two prime ministers who made
significant journeys from their right-wing roots and even if neither
entered the promised land of peace, both made gestures in that
direction. Ariel Sharon acknowledged the occupation as did his
successor Ehud Olmert, who went much further in recognizing a
Palestinian narrative and displaying some empathy to, for instance, the
Palestinian refugees. Judging from the Bar-Ilan University speech,
Benjamin Netanyahu has barely set out on that journey. For him, there
was no occupation, talk of Judea and Samaria but no West Bank, and
there was no sense of humanity in his approach to the Palestinians.
Although they are his neighbors and even 20% of his own citizenry,
their world would seem to be totally alien to him. He called, for
instance, on the Arab world to develop together joint tourist sites,
such as, "around the walls of Jericho and the walls of Jerusalem," with
no apparent appreciation for the irony of referring to walls in this
context.
Netanyahu, perhaps understandably, spoke to a lowest common
denominator – Jewish Israeli consensus, and his right wing coalition
was sleeping easy last night. And yet, he uttered those two magic
words, Palestinian state.
In other news the trucker strike that has crippled the nation's economy now enters its sixth week. The truckers decided to continue their blockade after a recent meeting with mr Finkelstein, a meeting which abruptly ended when mr Finkelstein stated he was retracting his earlier claim about Netanyahu being as rude and illiterate as a truck driver.
While simultaneously defining such a "state." Thus he "balanced" what he wanted with what his welfare donor wanted. What are the attributes of a state within the meaning of all states recognized by the UN?
The key to Netanyahu's version of a Palestinian state is that it utterly lacks the most generally accepted defining criteria: Has sovereignty. No other State should have power over the country's territory. When we look at the original early 20th Century international Mandate governed by the Brits, we see there is very little land left now, and it gets smaller by the day. The UN partition itself allocated land disproportionate to the respective populations at the time. This asymmetry continues unabated. Netanyahu made one step forward, two steps back. He is daring Obama to note this in public. Obama has to consider whether he has the political capital to do so. Basically, will he kowtow to the relatively small % representing jews and christian end-timers, who control US congress by 95%, or will he go higher, speaking directly to the US masses for their best interests? We will know by Xmas.
Japan has been demilitarized for over 60 years. They seem to be doing pretty well.
Netanyahu's current position is similar to Rabin's in 1993. Its a certainty that his "compromise" is entirely inadequate. What is adequate is a different question.