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Netanyahu's dangerous delusion

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the right remain under the delusion that they can sustain the occupation at no cost to Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem July 23, 2017. REUTERS/Abir Sultan/Pool - RTX3CK7H
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The Israeli right no longer bothers to conceal its abhorrence of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would provide the Palestinians with an independent state alongside Israel. It also rejects a one man, one vote solution, the fundamental principle of democratic rule, for one binational state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Instead, the right boasts of its ability to manage the conflict with reasonable or negligible cost to Israel’s diplomacy, security or economy. It argues that Israel can manage quite well without resolving the conflict and by accelerating development of its settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. The crisis that unfolded after the July 14 terror attack on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif that left two Israeli police officers dead has so far cost the lives of five Israelis and four Palestinians (excluding the attackers). It proves that even in managing the conflict, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been conducting itself like a bull in a china shop.

The failed management of the recent crisis peeled off the Band-Aid that the right has been working so hard to keep on the bloody conflict, exposing the wounds of the occupation to the glare of the international community and forcing it to get involved. Thus, the right-wing government provided non-Jewish politicians a foothold in Jerusalem — “Israel’s eternal and united capital,” in Netanyahu's words. This is the same Jerusalem that leads Netanyahu to fire off the hackneyed response that there is no difference between building in Jerusalem and building in Tel Aviv whenever a foreign leader dares criticize construction for Jews in the city's eastern, predominantly Palestinian areas. One can easily imagine Netanyahu’s incensed reaction had the “leftists” dared to discuss with foreign officials the removal of the contentious metal detectors that generated Muslim fury when Israel installed them at the entrance to the Temple Mount compound after the July 14 attack.

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