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.
