The Problem with Bibi's Palestine Plan

As an oratorical exercise, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies last Sunday was without doubt a tour de force. Clearly the product of an enormous investment of time and thought, it constituted as cleverly-crafted a statement as any Israeli politician has ever made.

When it comes to practicalities, however, the audit has to be very different. After all, Netanyahu did not announce anything like a program of realistic action that he intends to implement. His agreement to the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state - although certainly of enormous symbolic significance (how many other Likud leaders have ever enunciated the "S" word?) - seems to be entirely devoid of any immediate policy implications.

In this respect, Netanyahu's speech contrasts unfavorably with other great statements of policy in recent international history, some of which have also been aired at academic venues. For instance, the speech that US secretary of state George Marshall delivered at Harvard in June 1947 pronounced the inauguration of the "Marshall Plan" for European postwar recovery; president Kennedy's declaration in 1962 to students at Rice University in Texas that "we choose to go to the moon" was the prelude to the space race; the "Bush Doctrine," enunciated in a presidential address to West Point graduates in 2002, was immediately followed by the onset of the "War on Terror"; and (much closer to home) within less than a year of Ariel Sharon's pronouncement on "disengagement" at the Herzliya Conference in 2004, Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria.

BY COMPARISON, Netanyahu seems prepared to do nothing. From his point of view, the onus for action now lies with the Palestinians. It is they who have to fulfill the provisos which hedged around his promise to recognize their statehood. Specifically, they have to set their own house in order and get rid of the "Hamastan" established in Gaza; they have to publicly forgo the right of return; they must accept internationally imposed restrictions on their freedom of diplomatic and military action; above all, they must recognize Israel to be the state of the Jewish people.