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Israel’s Netanyahu Reopens Door to Palestinian State, but White House Is Unimpressed Israel’s Netanyahu Reopens Door to Palestinian State, but White House Is Unimpressed
(35 minutes later)
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Thursday tried to walk back his pre-election declaration that no Palestinian state would be established on his watch, but his new assertions appeared to do nothing to assuage an infuriated Obama administration.JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Thursday tried to walk back his pre-election declaration that no Palestinian state would be established on his watch, but his new assertions appeared to do nothing to assuage an infuriated Obama administration.
In an interview on MSNBC, Mr. Netanyahu also said he had not been trying to suppress the votes of Arab citizens with an Election Day video warning that they were heading to polling stations in large numbers. In a series of interviews with American broadcasters, Mr. Netanyahu also said he had not been trying to suppress the votes of Arab citizens with an Election Day video warning that they were being bused to polling stations in “droves,” remarks that had also caused outrage at the White House and around the world.
Mr. Netanyahu said that he still wanted “a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that he had not intended to reverse the position he took endorsing that in a 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University. “I haven’t changed my policy,” he said in the interview, his first since his resounding victory on Tuesday, which handed him a fourth term. “What has changed is the reality.” Mr. Netanyahu said he had not intended to reverse his endorsement in a 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but only to say that it was impossible right now. He cited the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and its pact with the militant Islamist Hamas movement, as well as the rise of Islamic terrorism across the region.
Despite this rhetorical reversal, Mr. Netanyahu did not say he was ready to return to negotiations or present any new ideas for achieving peace. He reiterated longstanding positions that the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and its pact with the militant Islamist Hamas movement, made an agreement impossible right now. “I haven’t changed my policy,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with MSNBC, his first since his resounding victory on Tuesday, which handed him a fourth term. “What has changed is the reality.”
“I don’t want a one-state solution; I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change,” he said. “I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.” “I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change,” he said. “I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.”
The White House and European leaders had expressed alarm over Mr. Netanyahu’s pre-election statement, on the eve of what had seemed like a close race, that there would never be a Palestinian state as long as he remained in office. But Mr. Netanyahu did not say he was ready to return to negotiations or present any new ideas for achieving peace, and the White House all but ignored his latest comments.
Obama administration officials said Wednesday that in light of that statement, they would consider supporting a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for the establishment of a sovereign Palestine roughly along the pre-1967 lines that divided Israel from the West Bank and Gaza. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said on Thursday that regardless of the prime minister’s clarifications, his pre-election statements demonstrated that he was “no longer committed to a two-state solution,” which “means that the United States is in a position to re-evaluate our thinking.”
On Thursday, the White House all but ignored Mr. Netanyahu’s new comments, focusing instead on what he had said before the vote. A day after other White House officials suggested that the administration might now support a Security Council resolution calling for the establishment of a sovereign Palestine roughly along the pre-1967 lines that divided Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, Mr. Earnest said Mr. Netanyahu’s statements “do have consequences for actions that we take at the United Nations and other places.”
“It means that the United States is in a position to re-evaluate our thinking,” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said, adding that Mr. Netanyahu’s comments backing away from support for a two-state solution “do have consequences for actions that we take at the United Nations and other places.” The standoff showed the lasting damage done to Mr. Netanyahu’s already-strained relationship with Washington during a divisive Israeli campaign. The tensions were worsened when the prime minister spoke to Congress, against White House wishes, to protest the emerging nuclear deal between six world powers and Iran.
Washington has long questioned Mr. Netanyahu’s commitment to a two-state solution and his seriousness about negotiations toward that outcome, like the talks led by Secretary of State John Kerry that collapsed last spring. In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu’s apparent reversal regarding a Palestinian state on the eve of an election was largely seen as a blatant, somewhat desperate appeal to take votes from parties on his right flank — which appears to be exactly what happened.
Those suspicions seemed confirmed on Monday when Mr. Netanyahu answered “correct” after being asked directly in a video interview with a right-leaning Israeli news site, “If you are prime minister, a Palestinian state will not be established?” Many analysts expected Mr. Netanyahu to backtrack after the ballots were tallied; after all, back in 2009, he refused to explicitly endorse an independent Palestinian state right up until the Bar-Ilan speech in which he did so.
“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,” Mr. Netanyahu told the news site, NRG. “Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand.” But in Washington, many officials have long suspected that Mr. Netanyahu was never serious about making peace with the Palestinians or about the American-brokered negotiations toward such an outcome that collapsed last spring. So when a right-leaning Israeli news site asked him directly on Monday, “If you are prime minister, a Palestinian state will not be established,” and he answered, “Correct,” they pounced.
Many Israeli analysts saw this as a blatant, somewhat desperate appeal to take votes from parties on his right flank that support unfettered construction in West Bank settlements — which is exactly what happened — and fully expected Mr. Netanyahu to backtrack after the ballots were tallied. “This is not a situation where the prime minister is creating some daylight between himself and President Obama,” Mr. Earnest said. Rather, the remarks created some daylight between Mr. Netanyahu and “Democrat and Republican presidents in the United States and every single member of the House of Representatives,” he said, referring to a unanimous House resolution late last year endorsing a two-state solution.
He made his 2009 speech embracing the concept of two states for two peoples shortly after a campaign in which he did not support it. These kinds of reversals are relatively common in Israel. Earlier on Thursday, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority seized on Mr. Netanyahu’s original repudiation of a two-state solution to say he would continue his unilateral strategy of seeking full United Nations recognition and using the International Criminal Court to press war-crimes charges against Israelis.
Earlier on Thursday, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority had seized on Mr. Netanyahu’s original repudiation of a two-state solution to say he would continue his unilateral strategy of seeking full United Nations recognition and using the International Criminal Court to press war-crimes charges against Israelis.
“If these things are true, it means that the Israeli government has no serious intentions to reach a peace agreement that will create two states based on the 1967 borders,” Mr. Abbas said at a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “We therefore will not retreat from our position to apply international law, and so it is our right to go anywhere in the world to realize our rights according to international law.”“If these things are true, it means that the Israeli government has no serious intentions to reach a peace agreement that will create two states based on the 1967 borders,” Mr. Abbas said at a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “We therefore will not retreat from our position to apply international law, and so it is our right to go anywhere in the world to realize our rights according to international law.”
The executive committee also denounced Mr. Netanyahu’s expression of alarm in a video on Tuesday about Arab citizens’ voting “in droves.” A White House spokesman on Wednesday called it “deeply concerning,” “divisive” and an attempt to “marginalize Arab citizens.” The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, when asked how he would respond if Mr. Netanyahu retracted his statements, said, “I don’t want to engage in wishful thinking.”
In the interview on Thursday, with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Mr. Netanyahu also sought to explain those statements and repair the damage, saying, “I’m very proud to be prime minister of all of Israel’s citizens, Arabs and Jews alike.” “Can you imagine Netanyahu standing up and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, but I believe in a two-state solution; I recognize the state of Palestine, I will carry my obligations, I will stop settlement activities’? People will laugh,” Mr. Erekat told reporters at a briefing in East Jerusalem. “If he says that he will stop settlement activities, I’ll go see him now. Now. In his house. I’ve been there before. I’ve known him for 31 years.”
He said his concern had been a “massive foreign-funded effort” to bus Arabs to polling places in order to oust him from office. After a pre-election blitz of which several commentators wryly observed that Mr. Netanyahu gave more interviews to Israeli news organizations in six days than he had during six years in office, the prime minister turned to international outlets on Thursday. It was a kind of damage-control tour after a campaign of hard-line stances and statements about Israeli Arabs that were widely condemned as race-baiting.
“I wasn’t trying to suppress a vote,” he said. “I was trying to get something to counter a foreign-funded effort to get votes that are intended to topple my party, and I was calling on our voters to come out.” “I wasn’t trying to block anyone from voting; I was trying to mobilize my own voters,” Mr. Netanyahu told Steve Inskeep of NPR in a conversation set for broadcast on Friday’s “Morning Edition.” “The Arabs in Israel are the only Arabs that have consistently had the right to participate in elections. That’s sacrosanct.”
Mr. Netanyahu added that he was proud that his Likud Party had won some votes in Arab towns. “I’m very proud of the fact that Israel is the one country in a very broad radius in which Arabs have free and fair elections. That’s sacrosanct,” he said. “That will never change.” He also said he was proud to be “prime minister of all of Israel’s citizens, Arabs and Jews alike.”
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, on Thursday denounced the Election Day video about Arabs’ being bused to polling places, echoing the outrage expressed by Arab-Israeli lawmakers, American Jewish leaders and European officials in the last three days. Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not respond to interview requests from The New York Times in the days leading up to Tuesday’s election or on Wednesday or Thursday. In addition to appearing on MSNBC and NPR, he was on Fox News on Thursday, where he said he hoped that White House considerations of supporting a United Nations resolution recognizing Palestine were “not true.”
“Today’s magic in Israel is how to export fear,” Mr. Erekat told reporters at a briefing in East Jerusalem. “Arabs are busing! Imagine if somebody stands in the French elections and says, ‘Jews are busing!’ Where are we living? This is happening in 2015!” “President Obama has said time and again, as I’ve said, that the only path to a peace agreement is an agreement, a negotiated agreement; you can’t impose it,” he said on Fox. “I think that you can’t force the people of Israel — who have just elected me by a wide margin to bring them peace and security, to secure the State of Israel — to accept terms that would endanger the very survival of the State of Israel. I don’t think that’s the direction of American policy.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s video was among a series of hard-line statements he made in an end-of-campaign blitz after polls showed Likud trailing its center-left challenger. Several Israeli commentators wryly observed that the prime minister had done more interviews in six days than in the previous six years. Mr. Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that he was “not suggesting that any policy decisions have been made at this point.” But he appeared unmoved by Mr. Netanyahu’s new talking points, saying of the two-state solution that American presidents have backed for decades, “It’s pretty clear that Israel is no longer committed to that outcome, that pursuit.”
On Thursday, he moved from Israeli outlets to international ones. He was scheduled to appear on Fox News in the evening and on Friday’s “Morning Edition” program on NPR.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not respond to interview requests from The New York Times in the days leading up to Tuesday’s election, or on Wednesday or Thursday.
In Washington, Mr. Earnest suggested that Mr. Netanyahu’s MSNBC remarks had done nothing to ease the administration’s concern.
Mr. Earnest said he was “not suggesting that any policy decisions have been made at this point.” But he maintained that Mr. Netanyahu’s comments before the election demonstrated that the Israeli government was “no longer committed to a two-state solution,” regardless of what the prime minister said later in television interviews.
White House officials noted that a two-state solution has been supported by Republican and Democratic presidents and by members of both parties in Congress, most recently in a unanimous House resolution late last year.
“So this is not a situation where the prime minister is creating some daylight between himself and President Obama,” Mr. Earnest said. “It’s creating some daylight between Democrat and Republican presidents in the United States and every single member of the House of Representatives.”
In a brief statement Thursday evening, the White House said Mr. Obama had called Mr. Netanyahu to congratulate him on “his party’s success in winning a plurality of Knesset seats.”In a brief statement Thursday evening, the White House said Mr. Obama had called Mr. Netanyahu to congratulate him on “his party’s success in winning a plurality of Knesset seats.”
The statement said Mr. Obama reaffirmed for the prime minister that the United States is committed to a two-state solution “that results in a secure Israel alongside a sovereign and viable Palestine.” The president also reiterated his intention to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, according to the statement. The statement said Mr. Obama had reaffirmed to the prime minister that the United States was committed to a two-state solution “that results in a secure Israel alongside a sovereign and viable Palestine.” He also reiterated his intention to reach a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, according to the statement.