I haven't always been the biggest fan of Uriel Heilman, but I have to say he does a great job in his JTA article "Who is Bibi trying to fool?". Heilman presents a basic fact that the much of the press has wanted to ignore: the incoming Israeli government does not support the two-state solution.
Heilman interviews Zalman Shoval, a foreign policy adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu and a former
Israeli ambassador to the United States, after he spoke with the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in New York yesterday:
I put the question to him simply and directly, and asked him for a simple and direct answer in return: Does Mr. Netanyahu favor the eventual creation of a Palestinian state?
Shoval's response: Um… we'll get back to you on that.
"We're not going to rule out anything at this stage, but we're certainly not foing to determine anything at this stage," Shoval said. "We think it would be foolhardy today to agree to a set formula. There's no justification for a rush into a solution."
Except, perhaps, the prevention of more bloodshed on both sides.
Netanyahu has been careful to leave his options open. While he is on record against a Palestinian state — he fought the idea when his predecessor at the helm of Likud, Ariel Sharon, backed the notion in 2002, and when Sharon announced his plan to unilaterally withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, Netanyahu resigned from the government in protest in 2005 (Bibi was finance minister at the time) — Netanyahu has been more cautious in the last couple of years.
He and his representatives often try to deflect the issue, depending on the audience.
Shoval told me: "The Netanyahu government does not see itself as a government which would lord over the Palestinians."
Think that means yes to a Palestinian state? Thing again.
"I want to state our position very clearly," Shoval said Thursday. "The two-state solution has become a mantra."
"As far as we are concerned," he said, "it's a formula that has to be judged by its practicability, and not ideology for or against."
"Netanyahu's approach to the Palestinians is pragmatic."
But what is it, exactly. To help build Palestinian institutions, "not instead of political negotiations, but as a conduit or corridor for political negotiations," Shoval said.
And then what?
Shoval and Netanyahu's formulations leave the door open for any number of options, including transforming Jordan into the Palestinian state — something many of Netanyahu's supporters favor — or giving the Palestinians limited control over their own affairs and calling it a day. The latter option seems more and more to be along the lines of what Netanyahu is thinking.
The 'Jordan option' for the Palestinians has been rejected again and again and again (there are more, but you get the point). It's not a remote possibility, and for Netanyahu or Israel to put it forward is really a stalling tactic serving Netanyahu's actual plan, which is to formalize an apartheid state in Israel/Palestine. Or as Heilman puts it – "[give] the Palestinians limited control over their own affairs and [call] it a day."
Notice this article does not make mention of bogeyman Avigdor Lieberman. This rejection of sovereignty for Palestinians is not a fringe right demand that Netanyahu is being forced to accommodate – it is the policy that he has advocated for years. It is the platform he ran on. The Obama administration is going to have to come to grips with the fact that its belief in an "inescapable" movement towards a Palestinians state is being destroyed by its supposed greatest ally.
