Benjamin Netanyahu grew up in a very nationalistic Zionist home, and he’s always been on the right wing of the Zionist movement. He personifies some of the most negative aspects of Zionism, like racism, militarism, and Jewish supremacy, but, above all, the territorial ambition of the Israeli right, which is Greater Israel. His political career has been dedicated to preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
But he is not alone: the Likud party has never accepted the case for a two-state solution. The policy guidelines of Netanyahu’s current government say that Jews have an exclusive right to sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel, which for nationalists includes the West Bank or, as they prefer to call it, Judea and Samaria. This is a stark denial of any Palestinian national rights anywhere in historic Palestine. This position of the Netanyahu government is more extreme than the July 2018 Jewish Nation-State law, which said the Jews have a unique right to self-determination in the State of Israel. This was a claim to exclusive Jewish rights to statehood within the pre-1967 borders of Israel, but it didn’t lay the claim to Jewish sovereignty over the West Bank.
Netanyahu, before the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, used to boast that Israel has won, that the Palestinians are defeated, and that without conceding anything to the Palestinians, Israel can have peace treaties with Arab states. He was referring to the Abraham Accords, the peace accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, which were brokered by Donald Trump in his first term as US president in 2020. For Netanyahu, this was a major diplomatic victory: peace with Sunni Arab states without making any concessions on the Palestinian issue.
There used to be a collective Arab position on peace with Israel embodied in the Arab Peace Initiative, which was adopted at the Arab League summit in Beirut in 2002. It says Israel can have peace…
Auteur: Avi Shlaim
