“Netanyahu only wants one-and-a-half states”.
The joke, I assume, is supposed to be about the current Israeli Prime Minister’s strategic and tactical refusal to endorse a “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though Netanyahu says he is champing at the bit to relaunch negotiations (the Palestinians called them off during Operation Cast Lead earlier this year, and are now advancing a number of demands that should be met before the negotiations are resumed).
This bitter Palestinian joke could also refer to the effective split between the West Bank and Gaza … but that’s probably not the point.
Or, maybe it means that Netanyahu wants everything, all of it: Israel + the occupied Palestinian territory (maybe minus Gaza?).
Anyway, in an opinion piece published in Haaretz today, George Washington University Professor Amitai Etzioni wrote that “If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had walked out of the White House on May 18 and announced that he accepted President Barack Obama’s demands to freeze all settlement construction, he would merely have forced the president to demand some other significant concession from Israel … Netanyahu succeeded overnight in taking back a very major concession that previous Israeli governments had made and turning it into a significant bargaining chip. For years – surely ever since Ehud Barak made his famous magnanimous peace offer – Israeli support for a two-state solution was more or less taken for granted. In a surprisingly short period, Netanyahu has put Israel into a position in which if it agrees to two states, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan will be able to say that they and Obama have wrested a major concession from Israel’s ‘right-wing government’. But by far the most important step Netanyahu took during his May visit received next to no attention. This may be because he made the point rather indirectly. Netanyahu stated, ‘I want to make it clear that we don’t want to govern the Palestinians. We want to live in peace with them. We want them to govern themselves, absent a handful of powers that could endanger the state of Israel’. He did not say what these powers were or what dangers stem from calling ‘home rule’ a ‘state’; he left these issues vague. But all those well-versed in the fine print of the envisioned two-state solution – though very few others – know that the Palestinian state is not expected to have the powers of a normal state. It will not be free to bring in all the arms and military units it desires, deny Israel the right to fly over its territory or exercise other powers that practically all sovereign states have. The same point was made by two leading foreign policy mavens not suspected of pro-Israeli bias: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. Both favor pushing a two-state solution, but Brzezinski suggests ‘an American line [of troops] along the Jordan River’, and Scowcroft favors putting a ‘NATO peace-keeping force’ on the West Bank. The reason is obvious: to prevent the West Bank from being turned into a larger version of Gaza. There are several problems with this approach. American or NATO troops could be withdrawn overnight. Moreover, the American troops in Iraq and the NATO ones in Afghanistan have been unable to stop terrorists’ bombs and rocket attacks in those parts. There is no reason to believe they would do better on the West Bank … Moreover, there are very few precedents for demilitarized states. A two-state solution is understood by most people as one that entails two sovereign states … Hence it is important to deal now with the question of whether advocates of the two-state solution really mean two states – exactly the issue Netanyahu raised. If the answer is a hobbled state, Netanyahu may be right that it better to call it something else. If it is to be a true state, security arrangements other than relying on the U.S. and NATO are called for”… This opinion piece can be read in full here.
Yes, unfortunately, these concessions were made by the late Yasser Arafat and the current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in the Oslo process, where — although the word “State” was never mentioned. The future Palestine was to be demilitarized, and many Palestinian officials argued that it would not need any army, just police. It is not wrong to ask if the entity that would result from negotiations based on such a presumption would be, really, a state.