Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a startling admission that to many did not come as a surprise at all: that in the aftermath of the 1993-5 Oslo Accords, he deliberately worked to undermine a two-state solution that would have seen the Palestinians given a separate state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“I’m proud that I prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state because today everybody understands what that Palestinian state could have been, now that we’ve seen the little Palestinian state in Gaza,” Netanyahu told Israeli reporters on Saturday.
Using common Zionist language to describe the West Bank by referring to the ancient Jewish kingdoms of Judea and Samaria, Netanyahu went on to say that “everyone understands what would have happened if we had capitulated to international pressures and enabled a state like that in Judea and Samaria, surrounding Jerusalem and on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.”
He also called the Oslo Accords a “mistake” he had “inherited” from then-Prime Minister Ytzhak Rabin, who signed the agreements to end the violence of the First Intifada, at the time the largest-ever Palestinian national uprising.
Since Oslo, Western leaders have included support for a two-state solution in their standard repertoire of diplomatic positions, asserting the agreement whenever violence between Israelis and Palestinians flares up. That includes US President Joe Biden, who in 1986 declared that “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”
Indeed, Netanyahu’s government has been pressuring the White House not to publicly mention the two-state solution, according to US media reports.
Esteban Carrillo, a journalist and editor for the online news magazine The Cradle, told Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Monday that while the US and Arab states continue to talk about a two-state solution, the government doing the most for Gaza was the Yemeni militant group Ansarallah, which controls most of Yemen, including its capital of Sana’a, and operates as the de facto government of the region’s poorest country.
“Well, what else can the White House say honestly, this is literally their only playing card,” he said. “And at this point, they've been arming Israel as they are conducting what is essentially a genocide in the Gaza Strip, displacing 2 million people, killing - there's a new report today saying that it’s actually around 25,000, with hundreds missing, still under the rubble because the rescue efforts cannot go on. So, of course, you know, Biden, they have to go back to Oslo, they have to go back to the Oslo Accords.”
“Of course they have failed, and they failed because of Israel. And this call for a new two-state solution and now a revamped Palestinian Authority, this is going to fail as well, and it is because the Israelis do not even want to hear a word about this. They are saying it. There was a report a few days ago on some US outlet that said the Israelis are telling the US to stop talking about a two-state solution. Some Israeli official was interviewed, I think on Sky News over the weekend, and he was asked like, ‘why shouldn't the Palestinians have the same rights?’ And they're saying, essentially, ‘they can't have the same rights as us because that that would mean that the genocide of the Jewish population of Israel.’ You know, they always talk in these very maximalist terms and then their actions are as well as we are seeing with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They say they are there to eradicate Hamas, but the Hamas losses are minimal, and at this point, you have over 10,000 women and children killed.”
Carrillo noted that on Monday, Biden called Netanyahu’s government “the most conservative government in Israel's history,” adding that it “does not want a two-state solution.”
Asked about Biden’s comment, Mark Regev, Netanyahu’s senior adviser for foreign affairs and international communications, brushed the disagreement aside, pointing instead to their agreement on the need to destroy Hamas through a military operation and expressing his belief that the US and Israel would come to an agreement on a “post-Hamas Gaza scenario.”
“I would imagine that what happens at the end of this, in their view, is the mass displacement, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the complete removal of these 2 million people and pushing them into the Sinai. They keep saying ‘the Arabs need to help them’, and it's for them [Israel] to control Gaza, for them to control the West Bank, to take it over completely.”
“Even Netanyahu is saying ‘we don't want the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian Authority also wants to eradicate us’, even though the Palestinian Authority is an organization that has for decades collaborated with Israel to suppress resistance in the West Bank. They are very much disliked in the occupied Palestinian territories because of these reasons and some others. So, you know, the Israelis, you need to look at their actions and you need to look at their statements. And they're very straightforward with what they want: you see former officials, you see current officials getting asked, ‘you are going after Hamas, but, you know, we see all these innocent civilians’ and they say, ‘well, there's no innocents in Gaza, there's no civilians in Gaza’. This is the language of genocide and this is what's happening. And it's you know, it's taken such a long time for the Western world, or at the very least for Western media, for Western leaders, even Arab leaders, to accept this as a fact, that what is happening to the Palestinians right now, if it's up to Israel, it's not going to stop.”
“Netanyahu today just said they need to increase the defense budget to around $5.5 billion. You know, they're not looking for the escalation.”
Carrillo said Biden’s talk of a two-state solution “is just cover” because they are really interested in suppressing Ansarallah because Yemen is “in control of” global trade with its blockade of the Red Sea to Israeli vessels.
19 December 2023, 17:30 GMT
“Today, BP said: ‘we are no longer going to operate in the Red Sea’. The same with Evergreen. That's on top of five other shipping firms that already said ‘we will not operate in the Red Sea anymore because of the threat posed by Yemen’. And now, remember, Yemen, in the Arab world, they are the poorest country. They're the least developed. This is a country that has been at war for eight years, brutal war. You know, at one point during the first two years, they were getting bombed every 3 hours in the capital, in Sana'a. But now, they are not just putting their country on the line, themselves on the line, they are showing that they have capabilities beyond what anybody really expected.”
“In Western media, you keep hearing, they don't call them Ansarallah, which is this resistance faction, they call them the Houthis. The Houthis, you know, like they're this backwater tribe with AK-47s somewhere in the desert, when in reality who is doing these attacks and who are conducting these attacks on the Red Sea are the Yemeni Armed Forces.”
“So now, you know, the Arab world's poorest country is doing essentially the most for Palestine. And the United States has been caught completely with their pants down, because right now the only way that they can stop. This is essentially opening a war front in Yemen. And that's why [US Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin is right now here in the region. He's in Israel, he's going to meet some Arab leaders too - it's because they want to launch this naval task force, they want to call it Operation Prosperity Guardian, to stop Yemen.
“And that I think is really the most pressing issue right now in the halls of power in Washington, because what happens after the war in Gaza is going to be what happened before the war in Gaza. You know, this didn't start on October 7. This got worse on October 7, and the Israelis got punched in the nose on October 7, but before then, Gaza was already the world's largest concentration camp. They were already being bombed every so often, you know, the Israelis control everything. So in the outcome of these, no matter what the United States says, the Israelis will still at the very least, want to continue to control everything.”