Everything old

Whatever else you might say about it, Binyamin Netanyahu's speech was a "dramatic transformation" for him.  Wasn't it?

Let's take a look at a 1996 interview with David Bar-Illan, then a top advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu 1.0:

Mr. Netanyahu has often said that he wants the Palestinians to have as much self-rule as possible, as long as it does not endanger the security of Israel. Now if you have a sovereign state, obviously you can have as large an army as you can raise, you can produce or import all sorts of weapons.

So in 1996 Netanyahu endorsed Palestinian self-rule without actual sovereignty.  By comparison, Netanyahu mentioned the word "sovereign" or variants three times in his latest speech—all in reference to Israel.  The most significant of those was "This tragic history of powerlessness explains why the Jewish people need a sovereign power of self-defence"—a recognition that the right to self-defense is a feature of a sovereign nation, which makes the meaning of his requirement that any Palestinian state be demilitarized crystal clear (and of course the Palestinians, with their triumphant and powerful history, don't need to defend themselves from anyone).

Going back to 1996, Bar-Illan continued to explain this notion of not-quite sovereignty he and Netanyahu shared:

If we say the Palestinian entity must have limited sovereignty, we can impose it primarily if we are still on the Jordan River, because we can immediately close any connection between the Palestinians and the Hashemite Kingdom if we want to. If we are not there, it’s impossible to close that border.

(This would be the official excuse for Israel's effective annexation of the Jordan Valley.)  And just in case anyone wasn't getting the point, Bar-Illan drove it home in no uncertain terms:

I am not talking about the State of Palestine, a state implies sovereignty, but the entity of Palestine, commonwealth, whatever you want to call it, that is what the prime minister meant when he talked about a possibility of limited sovereignty, at least for a time. [...] Semantics don’t matter. If Palestinian sovereignty is limited enough so that we feel safe, call it fried chicken.

This, then, is what Netanyahu and his top advisor were saying in 1996.  So Netanyahu's "dramatic transformation" in his speech this week was that he finally, fully embraced Bar-Illan's understanding that semantics don't matter, and he could mouth the meaningless words "Palestinian state" in reference to the fried chicken Israel is willing to grant to the Palestinians—who can then pick up the trash and run the prisons in their bantustans, and generally pretend that what they've got is a real state, just like the big kids have!

(This was similar to Ariel Sharon's realization that withdrawing from the Gaza Strip—which was all but worthless to Israel anyway, except as a bargaining chip—would "supply the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."  Every once in a while the insane far right realizes that the whole "crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women" talk that expresses the deepest desire of their shrivelled, blackened hearts doesn't play well to a general audience, and gets a little smarter about covering it up.  Which is also when they're the most dangerous.  By contrast, the ostensible left understands the need to blow smoke constantly about what it's doing, which is why it's usually more dangerous than the right.)

With that out of the way, it's worth noting the specific contexts in which Netanyahu used this semantically-meaningless phrase:

• "there is a real danger that an armed Palestinian state would emerge that would become another terrorist base against the Jewish state"
• "It is impossible to expect us to agree in advance to the principle of a Palestinian state without assurances that this state will be demilitarised."
• "If we receive this guarantee regarding demilitirization and Israel's security needs, and if the Palestinians recognise Israel as the State of the Jewish people, then we will be ready in a future peace agreement to reach a solution where a demilitarised Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state."

So we have one mention of the threat a Palestinian state would pose to Israel, one assertion that it's "impossible" to expect Israel to agree in advance to the principle of a Palestinian state, and one statement that Israel may be ready in some vague and distant "future peace agreement" to "reach a solution" involving some form of Palestinian "state" (or fried chicken, or whatever else you want to call it).

Now that is one hell of a dramatic transformation.

UPDATE: I somehow missed Netanyahu stating point blank in his speech that he'd told Obama "if we could agree on the substance, then the terminology would not pose a problem."  Nice to have it straight from the horse's ass's mouth.

Comments

[Omooex]

Hi, a friend of mine sent me your post, which was excellent. Don't you think, however, that there really isn't any daylight between Netanyahu's position and the original terms of Oslo? Oslo envisioned exactly the kind of autonomous-in-name-only that Netanyahu describes...

[SteveB]

If Palestinian sovereignty is limited enough so that we feel safe, call it fried chicken.

Actually, we're not letting then have the fried chicken either.

[John Caruso]

Omooex: Yes, I'd agree there wasn't much difference between Netanyahu's position and Oslo...and back then it might even reasonably have been considered news.

[Freddy el Desfibradddor]

Speaking of fried chicken, I once read an anecdote by Harry Golden (born in Austro-Hungarian Ukraine as Hirchel Goldhirsch, stockbroker, convicted felon [pardoned by Nixon], Southern reporter and integrationist) about how he was once addressing a lunch meeting of the Kiwanis or Chamber of Commerce or something like that. Everyone was served ham, but in consideration of g*d's commandments to the Jews about what not to eat, they gave Golden chicken. Unfortunately, they had fried it in butter.

Golden related this story in a humorous way, not a bitter way. In fact, until I looked him up in Wikipedia just now I thought of him as a humorist, not as a criminal and race-mixer.