Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took off for Washington Feb. 13 for his first official meeting with President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, back in the Knesset, the Likud faction's chamber was packed with people attending the conference “Renouncing the Two-State Solution.” Particularly conspicuous among the assembly of Knesset members and heads of local and regional authorities were several Likud ministers, including Gilad Erdan, Ofir Akunis, Gila Gamliel and even the Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein. All in all, about half of the party's Knesset faction attended the event, sponsored by the Nationalist Staff of the Likud, a faction identified with the settler movement. The turnout was especially impressive considering that most of the attendees do not bother to attend weekly party meetings with the prime minister.

While it may have been important for them to demand that Netanyahu renounce the idea of a two-state solution, what these Knesset members and ministers wanted most was to score political points with the party's hard right. Netanyahu had only been informed about the event the day before it took place. In that space of time, he also heard the chairman of HaBayit HaYehudi, Naftali Bennett, demand that the two-state solution be buried. Nevertheless, as Netanyahu stood on the ramp to his plane, he declared, “I will lead, and I will navigate. That's exactly what I plan on doing, leading and navigating the historic alliance between Israel and the United States so that it benefits Israel's national interests and the Israeli people.”

Netanyahu's remarks were aimed at all those ministers who were taking advantage of his meeting with Trump to create the impression that they were forcing him to take a hard-line position. Bennett and all the Likud's ministers, Knesset members and activists with a strong ideological bent know that Netanyahu has absolutely no plans to issue a public renunciation of the two-state solution as they are demanding. They are simply taking advantage of the high-profile meeting between the US president and the prime minister for their own personal needs.

Netanyahu has no intention of renouncing the two-state solution, which he first publicly supported in June 2009 in his famous Bar Ilan speech after being pressured by President Barack Obama a few months before the start of his second term as prime minister. Then, like now, Netanyahu announced his support for the idea but added certain qualifications, which made it impossible for the Palestinians to adopt his two-state principle as the basis for negotiations. His demands ranged from the Palestinians recognizing Israel as the “state of the Jewish people” as a prerequisite for any negotiations to insisting that any future Palestinian state be demilitarized. As far as Netanyahu was concerned, he had found the perfect formula to prove his goodwill to the world while also presenting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as the one blocking all attempts to reach a peace agreement.