Newsrooms were eager to report last week that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had flip-flopped when he allegedly abandoned his commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state – but it appears the alleged backtracking may be more a case of misreporting than a change in the former commando’s position.
At the heart of the alleged flip-flop are comments Netanyahu made prior to the Israeli election about a possible Palestinian state in an interview with Israeli’s NRG.
In the discussion with the conservative publication, Netanyahu was asked whether his 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University, which saw him pledging support for the idea of a Palestinian state, was “relevant.”
“You said that the Bar-Ilan speech was not relevant,” the NRG interviewer said, according to a translation obtained by the Washington Examiner. “Do you see it as [Naftali Bennett, the head of the Bayit Yehudi Party] does, that a Palestinian state will not come into being?”
“I think that anyone who intends to create a Palestinian state today and to give up land is giving radical Islam a launching ground against Israel,” the Israeli prime minister responded. “This is the reality that was created here in recent years. Anyone who ignores this has his head buried in the ground. The left does this, buries its head in the ground again and again. We are realistic and understand. The test is who will build the next government.”
Netanyahu later said that he would not “capitulate,” adding that his reputation for being unshakable on such issues is likely why his election year opponents mobilized “such vast efforts against” him.
The prime minister was asked again, “If you were prime minister, a Palestinian state would not arise?”
“Indeed,” he said.
Netanyahu’s remarks were taken to mean that he had abandoned the idea of a Palestinian state altogether.
“Netanyahu: If I’m Elected, There Will Be No Palestinian State,” Ha’aretz declared in a report, which included only a few select quotes from the NRG interview. “In a definitive disavowal of his Bar-Ilan two-state speech, prime minister makes last-minute attempt to draw voters from Bennett’s Habayit Hayeudi.”
The New York Times accused Netanyahu at the time of doubling down on his shrewd election-year efforts to court “right-wing voters,” reporting that he had declared “definitively that if he was returned to office he would never establish a Palestinian state.”
Bloomberg News, for its part, tied the supposed flip-flop to Republican lawmakers, reporting last week that they gave “a collective shrug over the Israeli prime minister’s statements that he will no longer pursue a two-state solution.”
The Hebrew translation featured in the Bloomberg News article misses Netanyahu’s claim that it’s unlikely a Palestinian state is established either “today” or in the near future, which likely leads readers to believe that the prime minister is against the idea entirely.
A host of other news outlets joined in last week to report that Netanyahu had flip-flopped, many of them missing his remarks that it is unlikely Israel and Palestine find a two-state “today,” including Foreign Policy, Vox and CNN, to name just a few.
Major U.S. newspapers prominently featured op-eds dinging the Israeli prime minister for his supposed change of heart.
Netanyahu later revisited his remarks, saying after he had won re-election that he doesn’t “want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution…I haven’t changed my policy.”
These remarks were seen as a climbdown from his pre-election comment.
But as David Horowitz wrote Sunday for the Times of Israel, a more generous reading of Netanyahu’s original comments in the NRG interview reveals that his position on the Palestinian state issue is more nuanced than the “flip-flop” headlines would suggest.
“[T]here was legitimate substance behind [the remarks], substance that Netanyahu has repeatedly detailed,” he wrote, adding that the Middle East is currently “reeling” from the slaughter brought on by Islamic extremism.
At the center of these horrors, Horowitz noted, is Iran, a noted state sponsor of terrorism that the Obama administration is apparently eager to negotiate with over nuclear capabilities.
“Is it truly so outrageous, so unacceptable to assert that now and the foreseeable future might not be the best time for a country nine miles wide at its narrowest point, on the western edge of this hostile land mass, to relinquish the contested territory from which it has been relentlessly attacked in the past?” he asked.
