We’ve come a long way, Bibi

The principle of direct talks steadfastly guided even the misguided progenitors of the Oslo folly – until Netanyahu’s current term.


Sarrah Honig
Another Tack: JPost
21 May '10

“There is no precedent of a conflict between nations being brought to finality without direct negotiations. In the conflict between the Arabs and Israel, the issue of direct negotiations goes to the very crux of the matter. Our objective is to achieve peace and coexistence but how will our neighbors ever be able to live with us in peace if they refuse to speak with us?”

The above is a direct quote from an address by prime minister Golda Meir to the Knesset on May 26, 1970, 40 years minus-five-days ago. The insistence on direct talks was cardinal for Israeli leaders before and since the above statement. A succession of foreign emissaries and politicos came and went, but Israel consistently recoiled from the notion of go-betweens and shuttle diplomacy.

The principle of direct talks steadfastly guided even the misguided progenitors of the Oslo folly – until the advent of Binyamin Netanyahu’s current term.

Decades of making one existentially risky concession after another existentially risky concession, of erasing one declaratively ineradicable red line after another, of drawing new “red lines” but deleting these in turn, have certainly paid off. We have gained so indubitably much. We’re so ahead of the starting line. At the beginning we wouldn’t hear of indirect negotiations. After we had yielded so much ground, we are at long overdue last engaged in – indirect negotiations. It was all really worth it. We’ve come a long way, Bibi!

TO BE fair, it’s not all his fault. Netanyahu inherited an unenviable legacy. The Osloites stealthily ushered another Arab Palestinian state into the original territory once designated as Palestine, some 80 percent of which is already Arab (even if it parades under the wholly artificial name of Jordan). This negated Golda’s stance that “Israel and Jordan were the two state-successors to the British Mandate. There is no room for a third... A Palestinian state between us and Jordan can only become a base to make it even more convenient to attack and destroy Israel.”

Ehud Barak, in his catastrophic stint as premier, established the ever-insidious model of total withdrawal back to the 1949 armistice lines. More recently Ehud Olmert, Barak’s challenger for the dubious distinction of worst-ever prime minister, additionally reinforced Barak’s precedent. This, coupled with Washington’s most antagonistic administration ever, left Netanyahu in dire circumstances and with powerful incentives to just please the hectoring censorious chorus out there.

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