https://t.co/TQIZI7ooNw – #News #Times #NewsAndTimes #NT #TNT #Israel #World #USA #POTUS #DOJ #FBI #CIA #DIA #ODNI #Mossad #Netanyahu #Putin #Russia #GRU #Ukraine #SouthCaucasus #NewAbwehr #Bloggers #PoliticalPsychology #PoliticalPersonology #PoliticalCriminology…
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) January 22, 2024
Day: January 22, 2024
Save
You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.
Israel’s embattled leader has long opposed the emergence of an independent Palestine. For years, right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advocated against statehood for millions of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, worked to undermine the Palestinian national movement as it splintered between Islamist militant faction Hamas in Gaza and the feeble leadership of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and allied with a far-right Jewish settler movement that has systematically made a future Palestinian state more inviable.
Now, as Israel wages its punishing war against Hamas in Gaza, Netanyahu has faced renewed international calls to help resurrect the two-state solution: The vision of a pair of territorially distinct states, one for Israelis and one for Palestinians, that’s widely embraced by the international community, including the United States.
Arab governments indicated that they would only invest in rebuilding and stabilizing Gaza after the war — which has seen more than 25,000 Palestinians killed and much of the territory flattened — if Israel engages in a meaningful political process with the Palestinians. The White House, too, at least pays lip service to the “aspirations of the Palestinian people” and wants postwar Gaza to be administered by the Palestinian Authority as part of a broader rapprochement that revives the prospect of a two-state solution and further integrates Israel into its Arab neighborhood.
In private, senior Biden officials have pushed this plan to Israeli and Arab counterparts. On a Friday phone call with Netanyahu, President Biden reportedly floated the idea of a two-state solution where Israel’s security would be “guaranteed” — a recognition of Netanyahu’s long-standing suspicion of the threat any independent Palestinian entity poses to Israel. When asked by a reporter on Friday whether the two-state solution was an impossibility under Netanyahu’s watch, Biden replied, “No, it’s not.”
It didn’t take Netanyahu long to contradict Biden. “I will not compromise on full Israeli security control over the entire area west of [the river] Jordan — and this is irreconcilable with a Palestinian state,” he wrote on social media Saturday, nipping Biden’s hopeful talk in the bud.
In a statement in Hebrew the next day, Netanyahu pointed to his track record of thwarting the two-state solution. “My insistence is what has prevented — over the years — the establishment of a Palestinian state that would have constituted an existential danger to Israel,” he said. “As long as I am prime minister, I will continue to strongly insist on this.”
On Thursday, before speaking with Biden, Netanyahu had already laid out his rejection of the White House’s efforts. “For 30 years, I have been very consistent, and I’m saying something very simple,” he said at a news conference, arguing that any sovereign Palestinian entity was an unacceptable security threat to Israel. “This conflict is not about the lack of a state, a Palestinian state, but about the existence of a state, a Jewish state.”
Netanyahu was joined on social media by a chorus of parliamentarians in his right-wing coalition, who all echoed his rejection of Palestinian statehood in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack. “I say clearly to everyone who is still stuck on October 6th: we will never allow the establishment of a Palestinian state,” tweeted Miki Zohar, Israel’s minister of culture and sport. “This is our commitment to the murdered martyrs and fallen heroes.”
The phrase “from the river to the sea” has sparked controversy in both Israel and the United States, where pro-Palestinian protesters have invoked the slogan in demands for freedom and rights for Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Many Israelis equate these demands to calls for the erasure of the Israeli state, citing Hamas’s own past rhetoric. U.S. House lawmakers pushed legislation deeming the slogan “antisemitic.”
But Netanyahu and his ruling Likud party have their own fixed vision of what should exist between the river and the sea — Likud’s original party platform insists that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.” And the reality cemented under successive Netanyahu governments is one of Jewish supremacy and Israeli control over a large population of Palestinians whose lives are circumscribed by Israel’s security imperatives.
It’s a scenario a growing body of international officials find untenable. “The refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and the denial of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people, are unacceptable,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said over the weekend. “The right of the Palestinian people to build their own state must be recognized by all.”
According to the Financial Times, E.U. officials circulated a document ahead of a Monday meeting of foreign ministers calling on the bloc to think through potential steps if Netanyahu’s government maintains its stance on Palestinian statehood. “Brussels proposed that EU member states should ‘set out the consequences they envisage to attach to engagement or non-engagement’ with their proposed peace plan,” noted the FT.
Netanyahu is fighting for his political survival, amid fresh protests calling for his resignation. Many Israelis are critical of his fractious handling of the country before the Oct. 7 attack and resent his diffident treatment of the families of hostages held in Gaza.
“Politically, [Netanyahu] sold himself as Mr. Security, but that was obliterated on October 7th,” a leading conservative in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, told the New Yorker’s David Remnick. “Now he is Mr. Standing Up to America Who Will Impose on Us a Palestinian State. He is pivoting. After his grand failure, he needs a new story. He is going to try to sell the story that the security establishment failed, not him, and he is the only one to kill a Palestinian state.”
A canny operator, Netanyahu may yet see a path to clinging on to power, keeping the war rumbling while awaiting the potential return of his friend, former president Donald Trump, to office and a change in the political dispensation in Washington. As it is, critics of the Biden administration from the left believe the White House is complicit in the staggering devastation of Gaza and too weak to check Netanyahu’s uncompromising, hard-right agenda.
The United States should “take at face value [Netanyahu’s] government’s categorical rejection of Palestinian statehood and its written coalition guidelines that assert ‘the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,’” wrote Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator. “Washington should instead challenge Israel to set out a proposal for how all those living under its control will be guaranteed equality, enfranchisement and other civil rights.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
“We are continuing the war on all fronts and in all sectors. We are not giving immunity to any terrorist: Not in Gaza, not in Lebanon, not in Syria and not anywhere. Whoever tries to harm us, we will harm him.https://t.co/72A627wpQA pic.twitter.com/mZe5OmyvvH— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) January 21, 2024
“More substantively, Trump has failed to accept overwhelming evidence from his intelligence community that Russia was behind the devastating attack on our election in 2016”.
https://t.co/B2XpnF6awl— Dr. Dan Lomas (@Sandbagger_01) January 21, 2024
What Netanyahu sees from the river to the sea https://t.co/CNjyJ4FjKO
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) January 22, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally spoke Friday after a glaring, nearly four-week gap in direct communication during which fundamental differences have come into focus over a possible pathway to Palestinian statehood once the fighting in Gaza ends.
Biden and his top aides have all but smothered Netanyahu with robust support, even in the face of global condemnation over the mounting civilian death toll and humanitarian suffering in Gaza as the Israelis have carried out military operations in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
But the leaders’ relationship has increasingly shown signs of strain as Netanyahu has repeatedly rebuffed Biden’s calls for Palestinian sovereignty, gumming up what the U.S. president believes is the key to unlocking a durable peace in the Middle East — the oft-cited, elusive two-state solution.
Neither side shows signs of budging.
NEWS WRAP: Netanyahu tells U.S. he opposes Palestinian statehood after Gaza war
Friday’s phone call came one day after Netanyahu said that he has told U.S. officials in plain terms that he will not support a Palestinian state as part of any post-war plan. Biden, for his part, in Friday’s call reaffirmed his commitment to work toward helping the Palestinians move toward statehood.
“As we’re talking about post-conflict Gaza … you can’t do that without also talking about the aspirations of the Palestinian people and what that needs to look like for them,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.
The leaders spoke frequently in the first weeks of the war. But the regular cadence of calls between Biden and Netanyahu, who have had a hot-and-cold relationship for over three decades, has slowed considerably. Their 30- to 40-minute call on Friday was their first conversation since Dec. 23.
Both sides are hemmed in by domestic political considerations.
The chasm between Biden, a center-left Democrat, and Netanyahu, who leads the most conservative government in Israel’s history, has expanded as pressure mounts on the United States to use its considerable leverage to press Israel to wind down a war that has already killed nearly 25,000 Palestinians.
There is also growing impatience with Netanyahu in Israel over the lack of progress in freeing dozens of hostages still held by Islamic militants in Gaza.
“There is certainly a reason to be concerned,” says Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, “The more and more we see political considerations dominating the relationship between Biden and Netanyahu, which is likely to continue because of the upcoming presidential election and the weakness of both leaders, the more we will see them pulling apart.”
In their most recent calls, Biden’s frustration with Netanyahu has grown more evident, even though the U.S. leader has been careful to reaffirm his support for Israel at each step, according to U.S. officials who requested anonymity to discuss the leaders’ private interactions.
Yet, Biden, at least publicly, has not given up on the idea of winning over Netanyahu. Asked by a reporter on Friday if a two-state solution is impossible while Netanyahu is in office, Biden replied, “No, it’s not.”
Aides insist Biden understands the political box Netanyahu finds himself in with his hard-right coalition and as he deals with ongoing corruption charges that have left the prime minister fighting for his freedom, not just his political future.
Biden, meanwhile, faces American voters in November, in a likely rematch with former President Donald Trump. Netanyahu and Trump forged a close relationship during the Republican’s term in office. Biden faces criticism from some on his left who believe he hasn’t pushed the Israelis hard enough to demonstrate restraint as it carries out military operations.
Key Democratic lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, this week warned that Netanyahu’s position on statehood could complicate negotiations in the Senate on a spending package that includes military aid for Israel.
READ MORE: Blinken calls a pathway to a Palestinian state a necessity for Israeli security
Expect Netanyahu to “use every trick that he has to keep his coalition together and avoid elections and play out the clock,” said Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum. ”And I’m sure that part of it is a conviction that if he waits until November, he may end up with Donald Trump back in the Oval Office.”
In recent weeks, some of the more difficult conversations have been left to Ron Dermer, a top aide to Netanyahu and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., and Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. The two top aides talk almost daily — sometimes multiple times during a day, according to a U.S. and an Israeli official, who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Other senior Biden administration officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, as well as senior advisers Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein have been at the forefront of the administration’s push to engage the Israelis, and other Middle East allies, as the Biden-Netanyahu dialogue has become less constructive.
Netanyahu, who has opposed calls for a two-state solution throughout his political career, told reporters this week that he flatly told U.S. officials he remains opposed to any post-war plan that includes establishment of a Palestinian state.
The prime minister’s latest rejection of Biden’s push in that direction came after Blinken this week said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that Israel and its Middle East neighbors had “a profound opportunity” to solve the generational Israel-Palestinian conflict. Asked if he thought Netanyahu was up to making the most of the moment, Blinken demurred.
WATCH: ‘This year is a nightmare’ — Gaza’s children face starvation amid dire conditions
“Look, these are decisions for Israelis to make,” Blinken said. “This is a profound decision for the country as a whole to make: What direction does it want to take? Does it see – can it seize – the opportunity that we believe is there?”
The Biden-Netanyahu relationship has seen no shortage of peaks and valleys over the years. As vice president, Biden privately criticized Netanyahu after the the Israeli leader embarrassed President Barack Obama by approving the construction of 1,600 new apartments in disputed East Jerusalem in the middle of Biden’s 2010 visit to Israel.
Netanyahu publicly resisted, before eventually relenting to, Biden’s calls on the Israelis to wind down a May 2021 military operation in Gaza. And in late 2019, during a question and answer session with voters on the campaign trail, Biden called Netanyahu an “extreme right” leader.
The path to a two-state solution — one in which Israel would co-exist with an independent Palestinian state — has eluded U.S. presidents and Middle East diplomats for decades.
But as the war grinds on, Biden and his team have pressed the notion that there is a new dynamic in the Middle East in which Israel’s Arab and Muslim neighbors stand ready to integrate Israel into the region once the war ends but only if Israel commits to a pathway to a Palestinian state.
Biden has proposed that a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, could run Gaza once combat ends. Netanyahu has roundly rejected the idea of putting the Palestinian Authority, which is beset by corruption, in charge of the territory.
Netanyahu argues that a Palestinian state would become a launchpad for attacks on Israel. So Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River,” Netanyahu said. “That collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can we do?”
White House officials have sought to play down Netanyahu’s public rejection of Biden’s call for a two-state solution, noting that the prime minister’s rhetoric is not new.
They hold out hope Israel could eventually come around to accepting a Palestinian state that comes with strong security guarantees for Israel.
“I don’t think Biden has any illusions about Netanyahu,” said Daniel Kurtzer, who served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt during the Bill Clinton administration and to Israel under George W. Bush. “But I don’t think he’s ready to slam the door on him. And that’s because he gets the intersection between the policy and the politics.”
AP writers Julia Frankel in Jerusalem and Ellen Knickmeyer, Seung Min Kim, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed reporting.