(David Horowitz-Jpost).For the two-and-a-half months since he was sworn in for the second time as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu has been uncharacteristically quiet, making few speeches of substance and generally eschewing interviews. On Sunday night, at Bar-Ilan University, he reminded a local and international audience of his articulacy, with an address that will have pleased neither the Palestinians and the Arab world, nor the most ardent supporters of the settlement enterprise, nor the firm Israeli Left - but wasn't principally aimed at any of them.
His goal, rather, was simultaneously satisfying the Israeli consensus and the Obama administration, and in that he is likely to have largely succeeded.
Netanyahu set out two critical caveats. Israel, he made plain, can countenance Palestinian statehood only if, philosophically, the Palestinians publicly acknowledge Israel's essence as the homeland of the Jewish nation and, practically, if Palestine is demilitarized. "We don't want missiles on our cities," he said simply. "We want peace." And therefore, Palestine would have to be denied an army, the right to import arms, air sovereignty and the capacity to sign military treaties with the likes of Iran.
In a sense, this was a classic display of Netanyahu's longstanding insistence on reciprocity. You want Israel to support statehood for the Palestinians, he was saying to the Americans? Well, then give me the guarantees that their independence will not come at the expense of ours.
The demand can hardly strike Washington as unreasonable, and by prefacing it with that support in principle for Obama's efforts to change our region for the better, Netanyahu at a nuanced stroke lobbed the peacemaking ball back into the Palestinian court. And he moved himself a long way, if not perhaps all the way, from Obama's list of unsavory "obstacles to progress," to the place where Israel need always belong, among the potential "facilitators of progress." Over to you, Mr. Abbas.
