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Tel Aviv: On June 13, 2021, the Israeli parliament, Knesset, voted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by a narrow margin of 60 to 59 votes. After twelve years under Netanyahu’s rule, Israel will now be run by a coalition government led by Naftali Bennet, a former commando and homemade technology billionaire. The governing coalition represents parties from all sides of the political spectrum, including an Arab Islamic party called Ra’am.
Bennet inherited a land very different from that of his predecessors. But one thing remains the same. Across the world and in Israel, there is no topic that is discussed more frequently than the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict will determine Bennet’s legacy and be the lens through which the world judges him. He will therefore be well acquainted with Jewish military history and will perhaps look at the policies of Israel’s two longest-serving prime ministers – David Ben Gurion, his first, and Benjamin Netanyahu, his last.
While making a name for himself in politics, he was a strong supporter of Jewish historical and religious claims to the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. His seemingly harsh approach has sparked concern from Palestinian rights groups, but some experts such as Martin Indyk argue that Bennet will have no choice but to use a calculated and measured approach to maintain his broad coalition.
Indyk, a Middle East policy specialist and leading member of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in his article entitled ‘The End of the Netanyahu Era’ that Bennet will try to appease Arabs living in Israel as far as possible. . Arab parties. However, Bennet’s potential ambivalence towards Palestinians could not include territorial concessions that risked raging the law. As early as February 2021, he claimed that “as long as I have power and control, I will not hand over one centimeter of land to Israel.”
What he wants, with whom he is an ally and how he manages coalition politics will soon give us a better insight into Bennet’s policies. However, despite being more lip service than policy, the two-state solution is still being offered as a viable alternative.
A report from the Brookings Institute gives a grim diagnosis of the state of relations between Israelis and Palestinians. It claims that the two-state solution proposed by Yasir Arafat during the Oslo Accords is almost dead in the water three decades later, given recent developments, including the collapse of moderate Palestinian leadership and the establishment of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. The two-state solution, essentially a negotiated territorial compromise, has long been seen as the ‘only’ solution to the conflict. However, while two Israeli prime ministers, Ehud Barak (1999-2001) and Ehud Olmert (2006-2009), are engaged in concrete discussions on a two-state solution, most Israeli leaders have crossed a path of ‘survival of the fittest’.
Leading figures such as Peter Beinart of the Atlantic and late academic Edward Said argued that the two-state solution was never a viable option, and that there could be only one state governed by either a completely dominant or completely adult. If we look at the successes and failures of Netanyahu and Ben Gurion, one can find potential merits in the review.