In a highly anticipated speech at Minister Bar Ilan University, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu effectively laid out the minimal requirements of a two-state peace deal.
- A demilitarized Palestinian state and defensible borders for Israel.
- The public, binding and sincere Palestinian recognition of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish People
In making the second point Netanyahu rejected the implicit statement of US President Obama’s Cairo speech that Israel is a prize for the Jews in exchange for the Holocaust. He stated:
The connection of the Jewish People to the Land has been in existence for more than 3,500 years. Judea and Samaria, the places where our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked, our forefathers David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah ? this is not a foreign land, this is the Land of our Forefathers.
The right of the Jewish People to a state in the Land of Israel does not arise from the series of disasters that befell the Jewish People over 2,000 years -- persecutions, expulsions, pogroms, blood libels, murders, which reached its climax in the Holocaust, an unprecedented tragedy in the history of nations. There are those who say that without the Holocaust the State would not have been established, but I say that if the State of Israel had been established in time, the Holocaust would not have taken place. (Applause) The tragedies that arose from the Jewish People?s helplessness show very sharply that we need a protective state.
The right to establish our sovereign state here, in the Land of Israel, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People. (Applause)
As the first PM David Ben Gurion in the declaration of the State, the State of Israel was established here in Eretz Israel, where the People of Israel created the Book of Books, and gave it to the world.
Both the American and other governments and the media need to realize that both conditions, a demilitarized Palestinian state and a recognition of Israel being a Jewish state are not Likud positions but general Israeli ones.