As if no agreement had been signed between the world powers and Iran, and with the same old threatening rhetoric, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dedicated a large part of his speech on Dec.18 at the Likud Party convention to the Iranian nuclear program. His bottom line hasn’t changed either: Israel will not accept a nuclear bomb.
This was an anachronistic speech, lacking in vision, and most of all, detached from the international reality created after the signing of the Iranian Geneva deal on Nov. 24. The significance of the interim agreement is that in the next few months, at least until negotiations over a final agreement, the world powers are giving diplomacy a chance, calming the tone and halting the threats. Only in Netanyahu’s world has time been frozen. Not only on the Iranian front, but also on the Palestinian question. Netanyahu spoke as if US-sponsored negotiations haven’t been taking place in the last few months and declared, with a nod to the extreme right, “We won’t stop building the land for a minute.”
It seems that Netanyahu took several steps backward from the positions he expressed in his June 2009 Bar Ilan speech, at the beginning of his last term as prime minister, and returned to the familiar verbal sparring with the Palestinians. “I know they tell us that the reason there’s no peace is because of the settlements … That’s not correct,” said the prime minister to the convention delegates. “The reason is the continued opposition to the existence of a Jewish nation-state within any borders, and we have the right to a state like any other people. They don’t recognize a Jewish state … I can’t promise that an agreement will be reached, it doesn’t only depend on us.”
Seemingly, Netanyahu faced mitigating circumstances. He was speaking before the Likud convention, which has become a settler stronghold in the last few years, and it may be that he wanted to placate them. The sense he left at the end of his remarks, however, was of a prime minister who’s burying his head in the sand. It is as if Netanyahu refuses to recognize the fact that in the near future, the internal and international political realities will close in on him and that he will have to make decisions on the Palestinian issue.
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