This week's Jerusalem Post “Classic clip” coming on the heels of Israel's March 15th announcement that it seized the arms-laden Victoria cargo ship bound for Gaza, recalls Benjamin Netanyahu's public rejection of the idea of Palestinian Statehood in speech he delivered soon after Israel's capture of the Palestinian freighter, Karine A, in January of 2002.
That ship was found to be carrying 50 tons of weapons, including short-range Katyusha rockets, antitank missiles, and high explosives bound for the Palestinian Authority.
At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu was a former Israeli Prime Minister on a self imposed leave from Israeli politics. In an address that month before a National Council of Young Israel dinner in New York, Netanyahu praised the capture of the Karine A and spoke of what he called the “awful danger” of Palestinian Statehood.
“We have been reminded of the awful danger of the creation of an independent Palestinian state, This state will be a fortress of terror – a terrorist state – that we will not be able to control. Because once you have a state, it has ports. It has airports. It has international passageways. And a ship like that, and many others, could come by day, and by night, and deposit its cargo of death until it loads up, and loads up and loads up. Such lethal weaponry, that could endanger every citizen of Israel, every every child in Israel, indeed, the very State of Israel.”
“And I have always said, from day one of the Oslo agreement which I opposed, down to the present, that we must absolutely resist the calls for the creation of a Palestinian state, because – on this perhaps he wasn't consistent but he was right – Yitzhak Rabin had said: 'A Palestinian state means the death of the Jewish State,' and we will not die.”
Seven years later, in June 2009 in an address at Bar Ilan University, Prime Minister Netanyahu called for the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state.