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Netanyahu Says No Palestinian State if He Is Re-elected Netanyahu Declares No Palestinian State if He’s Re-elected
(about 2 hours later)
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Monday that as long as he is the leader, a Palestinian state would not be established, reversing his support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. JERUSALEM — Under pressure on the eve of a surprisingly close election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Monday doubled down on his appeal to right-wing voters, declaring definitively that if he was returned to office he would never establish a Palestinian state .
Mr. Netanyahu made the assertion on the eve of an election in which he is trailing in the polls. He has been campaigning aggressively, appealing to conservatives for support. The statement reversed Mr. Netanyahu’s endorsement of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University, and fulfilled many world leaders’ suspicions that he was never really serious about peace negotiations. If he manages to eke out a fourth term, the new stance would further fray Mr. Netanyahu’s ruinous relationship with the Obama administration and heighten tension with European countries already frustrated with the stalled peace process.
“I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands, is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel,” he said in a video interview published on the NRG website. “Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand. The left does this time and time again. We are realistic and understand.” “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel,” he said in a video interview published on the NRG Website, an Israeli news site catering to settlers. “There is a real threat here that a left-wing government will join the international community and follow its orders.”
Asked if he meant that a Palestinian state would not be established if he were to continue as Israel’s prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu replied: “Correct.” Mr. Netanyahu’s chief challenger, Isaac Herzog of the center-left Zionist Union, backs the two-state solution and has promised to try to restart talks with the Palestinians, though he has warned an agreement may not be possible. He has, however, made Mr. Netanyahu’s alienation of allies, especially Washington, a prime campaign point, and said Israel’s international isolation is itself a security threat.
The comments reversed a 2009 speech in which Mr. Netanyahu endorsed the concept of two states for two peoples between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. With his conservative Likud Party trailing the Zionist Union in the last pre-election polls, Mr. Netanyahu has ratcheted up his rhetoric in a panicky blitz of interviews and campaign stops in recent days. He accuses rivals of colluding with Arabs and moneyed antagonists in a global conspiracy to oust him. He has also belatedly begun to address the pocketbook questions that polls suggest will drive most people’s votes.
Palestinian officials quickly seized on Mr. Netanyahu’s comments, describing them as a validation of their long-held assertions. But in many corners, these efforts and the Palestinian flip-flop only underscore a longstanding critique: that Mr. Netanyahu, 65, who led Israel for three years in the 1990s and returned to the premiership in 2009, places staying in power above all else.
“Netanyahu did everything in his power to undermine the two-state solution,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. “I hope his statements and actions will be an eye opener. If he feels that he can do this with impunity, then he will continue doing it.” He himself called these early elections three months ago, confidently aiming to replace a governing coalition fractured over the Palestinian conflict and matters of religion with one he could more easily control. Instead, as Israelis head to the polls Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu is struggling for political survival in a nation itself riven over those issues and consumed with the high cost of housing and groceries.
”To those who say he is doing this for electioneering — no, that is Netanyahu,” Mr. Erekat said. “I think he wanted to destroy a two-state solution, not create two states.” Suddenly, the man crowned “King Bibi” — whose hard-line stance against the Iranian nuclear program and continued construction in West Bank settlements hurt him in some foreign capitals but resonated in an increasingly fearful and religious Israel — is being asked whether he would retire if he were not re-elected.
Mr. Netanyahu’s comments were reported as he visited Har Homa, a Jerusalem neighborhood where construction on land Israel captured in the 1967 war ignited international outrage. Mr. Netanyahu said he had authorized that construction during his first term to block Palestinians from expanding Bethlehem, and to prevent a “Hamastan” for militants from sprouting in the hills nearby. The election has become a referendum on Mr. Netanyahu’s tenure. While Israel’s complicated electoral math gives him a good chance of remaining at the helm even if the Zionist Union wins more of Parliament’s 120 seats than the Likud, the campaign has revealed a yearning for change across the spectrum.
Mr. Netanyahu stood next to maps of Har Homa, one from 1997 that showed its empty hillsides, and one showing its roughly 4,000 apartments today. A further 2,000 are under construction or planned. “A lot of people on the right wing are still right wing, they are just tired of him specifically, it’s very, very personal,” said Tal Schneider, a political blogger. “Israelis, they perceive themselves as creative, as nonconformists, they hate the feeling of stagnation, of seeing themselves as counting down to another war. This vacuum, this feeling of forever status quo, this is the Bibi fatigue.”
“It was a way of stopping Bethlehem from moving toward Jerusalem,” Mr. Netanyahu said of his approval of Har Homa, against the United States’ wishes, in 1997. “This neighborhood, exactly because it stops the continuation of the Palestinians,” he added, “I saw the potential was really great.” Mr. Herzog, the son of a storied Israeli dynasty whose father, Chaim, was Israel’s sixth president, prayed Monday at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City and vowed to unify the nation “after a long period of division.”
Mr. Netanyahu has long heralded Israel’s right to build anywhere in Jerusalem, but he generally says that his expansion of settlements — which most world leaders consider illegal — do not materially affect the map for a potential two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. “I promise: I will be a prime minister to everyone,” said Mr. Herzog, 54. “For right and left, for settlers, Haredim, Druze, Arabs, Circassians; I will be prime minister for the center and for the periphery.”
His acknowledgment that Har Homa was intended to disrupt Palestinian development between Bethlehem and Jerusalem — which the Palestinians see as their future capital — came as he sought to win back votes for his Likud Party and to take them from more conservative factions that oppose a Palestinian state. Later, he announced that his partner in Zionist Union, Tzipi Livni, had agreed to drop their deal to rotate the premiership — a focus of Mr. Netanyahu’s case against them. “We are united in our task to change the government,” Mr. Herzog said on Israeli television Monday evening. “The choice tomorrow is between desperation and hope, and the hope of the greater good for this country is change of the government.”
Palestinians and their international supporters staged huge protests against Har Homa in the 1990s, precisely because of its location at Jerusalem’s southern edge, arguing that preventing a connection between Bethlehem and the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem threatened the viability of a future Palestinian state. It was the formation of the alliance that altered the arc of the campaign. Polls quickly proved it more than the sum of its parts — Mr. Herzog’s midsized Labor Party and Ms. Livni’s tiny Hatnua — and put it on par with Likud in terms of Parliament seats.
“He has confirmed verbally for the first time what we have denounced for years,” said Xavier Abu Eid, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. “That Har Homa is not about an innocent ‘Jerusalem neighborhood’ on occupied land, but about splitting occupied East Jerusalem from Bethlehem.” But the right-wing bloc still looked far larger than the center-left, making Mr. Herzog’s path to the premiership difficult to plot. Seen more as consensus builder than commander in chief, he took voice lessons to address a persistent squeak and asked people not to use his nickname, Bougie. The gap between him and Mr. Netanyahu on whom Israelis saw as most suitable to lead them shrank but remained significant.
Har Homa, one of about a dozen Jewish areas on land that was occupied by Jordan before 1967 and annexed into Jerusalem by Israel after the war, is home to 25,000 people today. Most were drawn not by ideology but by the large apartments, parks and playgrounds, stunning views and lower prices than in the city center. Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign emphasis on security, his strong suit, backfired somewhat with the sharp White House criticism of his speech to Congress this month opposing the emerging nuclear deal between six world powers and Iran. He got the standing ovations he expected, but also provided an opening for attacks on his preferred playing field. Mr. Herzog and others argued that he was actually threatening Israel’s security by angering the White House, and that all his strident speeches had not yielded results on improving the terms of the Iran negotiations.
Mr. Netanyahu’s visit gave him a chance to appeal to pro-settlement voters and to rebut criticism about his government’s handling of Israel’s housing crisis. Polls show that most voters are far more concerned about high apartment prices than about security issues, and he said that Har Homa was “the solution for young couples who need a place to live.” The Zionist Union, meanwhile, hammered Mr. Netanyahu on domestic issues, especially housing, helped by a harsh state comptroller’s report showing prices shot up 55 percent from 2008 to 2013 and had continued to climb since. (A previous comptroller’s report on spending at the prime minister’s residences, including a $40,000 take-out tab one year, hardly helped the Netanyahu fatigue.)
The center-left Zionist Union alliance, Mr. Netanyahu’s main opponent, has emphasized pocketbook issues throughout the campaign. So have two centrist contenders, the Yesh Atid party of Yair Lapid, and Kulanu, headed by Moshe Kahlon, a former minister who quit Likud because of its failures on housing and other economic matters. The economic platform was also seized by Yesh Atid, the centrist faction that had stunned Israel by winning 19 Parliament seats in the last election, 2013, and Kulanu, a new party led by a popular former minister who broke from the Likud and had few nice things to say about his former boss.
With polls showing that Likud is trailing the Zionist Union, Mr. Netanyahu in recent days called on Mr. Kahlon’s supporters to “come home to the Likud,” and on Sunday, he promised to make the Kulanu leader finance minister. “Kahlon and I will know how to solve the housing problems together,” the Israeli leader said. “What’s striking is that the Israeli public seems to have lost interest with the Palestinian question — the general feeling is that it’s like the weather, nothing you can do about it,” observed Guy Ben-Porat, a political scientist at Ben Gurion University. “Economy, housing, all these issues where nobody’s sure what the difference is, exactly, between the parties, there’s a feeling of government failure. I think it’s really a personal election, meaning anti-Netanyahu.”
Mr. Kahlon rebuffed the offer. He has not said whether he would recommend Mr. Netanyahu or Isaac Herzog of the Zionist Union to be prime minister, and analysts see him as a crucial power broker in the formation of any coalition government. Most analysts agreed that Tuesday was unlikely to produce a clear winner. Once the votes are counted, Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, will poll party heads to see who they prefer as prime minister, a process that could take 10 days. Whoever Mr. Rivlin designates then has six weeks to try to create a coalition and form a government.
Mr. Netanyahu has focused more on his right flank, appearing at a rally Sunday evening in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv that was organized by settlers. Many in the crowd, estimated at 25,000 people, had been bused in from the occupied West Bank, according to local news reports. At the rally, Mr. Netanyahu vowed that there would be “no withdrawals” from the West Bank and “no concessions” to the Palestinians. Given the divisions, another possibility is a unity government, with the Zionist Union and Likud rotating the premiership.
In the interview with NRG, a website tied to the newspaper Makor Rishon, which largely serves settlers, Mr. Netanyahu said he also said he would continue construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank. Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute said the campaign has been “a struggle over the identity of the nation,” where she sees “overlapping cleavages” in income, education, religion and world view.
“There is a real threat here that a left-wing government will join the international community and follow its orders,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “There is going to be an international initiative to take us back to the 1967 lines and divide Jerusalem. These are real things. This is going to come and we need to form a solid, strong national government headed by Likud in order to ward off these initiatives.” “I’m very much afraid of the morning after,” Ms. Hermann said. “I see no way of either a right-wing government or a left-wing government acquiring the necessary public legitimacy, grass-roots legitimacy, in order to design — and more than that, implement — grand strategies on social-economic issues or even security-diplomatic matters.”
In Har Homa, Mr. Netanyahu said that Mr. Herzog and his running mate, Tzipi Livni, had “condemned” some building initiatives in Jerusalem. (They have criticized the timing of announcements for inflaming tensions with the Palestinians and with Israel’s allies, but have agreed with Mr. Netanyahu that existing Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, including Har Homa, should not be uprooted.) Voters appear energized by the close contest, and the last polls, published on Friday, suggest a large chunk remain undecided. Sara Dahan, a Jerusalem mother of three, said Sunday that she would either vote for the new Likud-breakaway, Kulanu, or, “if there is a chance my vote may influence helping making a change,” the Zionist Union.
Mr. Netanyahu said that Mr. Herzog would give East Jerusalem as a capital for the Palestinians. “Me and my friends in Likud, we won’t let that happen,” he added. “I don’t claim to know what is best for the country, but I do know what I see now and what I feel are the biggest problems,” said Ms. Dahan, who never before voted for Labor. “On the one hand is the security situation, which I would love to have some kind of solution for. On the other hand,” she added, “it’s the difficulties of a young couple, both working, having a difficult time buying an apartment, groceries, making it through the month.”
Also on Monday, the Zionist Union announced that it had dropped a plan to rotate the premiership between Mr. Herzog of the Labor Party and Ms. Livni of the smaller Hatnua faction, making clear that Mr. Herzog was the sole leader. Mr. Netanyahu’s final push to the right seemed to have worked on Adi Perkin, 24, who voted in 2013 for the pro-settler Jewish Home, but said Sunday that “probably in the end I will vote for Bibi in order to strengthen him.”
The rotation agreement had been seen by some voters as a sign of weakness and Mr. Netanyahu had focused much of his attack on the less popular Ms. Livni. “This election had a very bad side, which was that instead of talking to the citizens, the campaigns were about besmirching the others,” Ms. Perkin said. “All the ads were ‘just not Bibi,’ ‘just not Herzog.’ Instead they should have explained to the voters what they plan and what they want.”
In an interview on Israel’s Channel 2, Mr. Herzog said that his partnership with Ms. Livni was “stronger than ever” and that she had told him on Monday “that if this issue might become an obstacle, she will ensure maximum flexibility for me.” But Ido Nitai, 21, a bar manager, voted for Mr. Netanyahu last time, and now is shopping for someone — anyone — else. “If I wanted to keep the country in the same situation it is in today then I would vote for Bibi,” he said, “but I want to see a change here.”
“We are united in our task to change the government,” he said. “The choice tomorrow is between desperation and hope, and the hope of the greater good for this country is change of the government.”