The Bar-Ilan University Speech & Netanyahu’s Vision of a Palestinian “State”
- Benjamin Netanyahu built his political career opposing the creation of a Palestinian state as part of the “two-state solution” in Palestine/Israel advocated by the international community, including sabotaging the US-sponsored Oslo Accords during his first term as prime minister in the 1990s.
- After returning to power for his second term as prime minister, under pressure from President Barack Obama and the international community, Netanyahu gave a speech at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University in June 2009 where he said for the first time that he supported the creation of a Palestinian “state.” However, he attached numerous conditions that stripped the proposed “state” of any real sovereignty or independence, including:
- It would be demilitarized and its borders and airspace would be controlled by Israel.
- Occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem would remain under Israeli control.
- Palestinians would have to officially recognize Israel as the “state of the Jewish people,” thereby formally endorsing the systematic discrimination that indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel (who make up more than 20% of the population) face because they aren’t Jewish.
- Palestinian refugees expelled from their homeland during Israel’s establishment in 1948 and their descendants would not be allowed to exercise their internationally recognized legal right to return.
- In a speech to a joint session of the US Congress in 2011, Netanyahu reiterated and elaborated on his vision, stating:
- He would refuse to base negotiations on Israel’s internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders, the basis of previous talks and international efforts to make peace for decades.
- Israel would retain large so-called settlement “blocs” in and around occupied East Jerusalem, which jut into the West Bank (the heartland of any Palestinian state), effectively cutting it in two.
- Israel would maintain “a long-term military presence” in the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank, meaning Israel would control all entry and exit from the Palestinian “state” along with much of its most fertile agricultural land.
- In 2012, Tzipi Hotovely, a member of the Knesset (parliament) from Netanyahu’s Likud party, explained that the Bar-Ilan address was merely a "tactical speech for the rest of the world," noting: "We are opposed to a Palestinian state."
- In 2015, Netanyahu officially renounced the Bar-Ilan speech, with his Likud party issuing a statement declaring “the Bar-Ilan speech is null and void… Netanyahu's entire political biography is a fight against the creation of a Palestinian state.”
- In the years following his renunciation of the Bar Ilan speech, Netanyahu has repeatedly declared his categorical opposition to Palestinian statehood while massively expanding Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law and US policy, rendering the creation of a geographically contiguous Palestinian state impossible.
Influences on Netanyahu's policies towards the Palestinians
- Netanyahu’s views on the Palestinians and Palestinian statehood were heavily influenced by Zeev Jabotinsky, the founder of the right-wing Revisionist Zionism movement and ideological father of Netanyahu’s Likud party. Jabotinsky, who died in 1940, advocated the establishment of a “Greater Israel'' that encompassed not only what is today Israel, but the occupied Palestinian territories (West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza) and neighboring Jordan.
- Netanyahu was also deeply influenced by his father, Benzion. Benzion Netanyahu (who was born Benzion Mileikowsky before emigrating to Palestine from Poland in 1920 and changing his name to Netanyahu) worked for a time as a secretary to Jabotinsky in the 1930s and was deeply racist towards Palestinians and other Arabs. In a 2009 interview he explained his views, declaring:
“The Bible finds no worse image than that of the man from the desert. And why? Because he has no respect for any law. Because in the desert he can do as he pleases. The tendency toward conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.
“The two-state solution doesn’t exist. There are no two peoples here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population… There is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation…
“[There is] no solution but force… strong military rule. Any outbreak will bring upon the Arabs enormous suffering. We shouldn’t wait for a big uprising to start, but rather act immediately with great force to prevent them from carrying on.”
- In an interview with Netanyahu and his father after the Bar-Ilan speech in 2009, Benzion said of the caveats that Benjamin, who was sitting next to him, had placed on Palestinian statehood:
“He supports the kind of conditions [Palestinians] would never in the world accept… That’s what I heard from him. Not from me. He put forth the conditions. These conditions, they will never accept them — not even one of them.”
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