Netanyahu Issues Veiled Rebuke to Blinken: Israel Will Achieve 'Complete Victory'

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a veiled rebuke to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday night, pushing back against Blinken’s claim that Israel could not defeat Hamas in Gaza, and that it should accept a Palestinian state.

Without naming Blinken specifically, Netanyahu criticized those who, he said wanted to tie Israel’s hands and said that Israel could not win.

On Wednesday, reports emerged that Blinken had told Netanyahu last week that Israel would not succeed in destroying Hamas’s military capabilities — an assertion at odds with Israel’s ongoing military success, and strong Israeli public support for the war. Blinken and the Biden administration also want Israel to accept a Palestinian state as a condition of peace.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Blinken told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman — a rabidly anti-Netanyahu opinion writer — that Israeli society, not the Arab nations, was the current obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

The reaction from the prime minister’s office was defiant.

Netanyahu began his press conference by reading from a note he had received from the mother of a paratrooper who had died in Gaza: “So that we will know they did not fall in vain, destroy the evil,” she implored him.

He vowed to continue the war until Israel had achieved all of its goals — destroying Hamas, returning the hostages, and restoring security to Israel’s borders.

In response to the Biden administration’s reported efforts to work around Netanyahu, and to plan for “the day after Netanyahu,” the prime minister said that with regard to the Palestinian state, the “day after Netanyahu” is “the day after the majority of citizens of Israel,” who oppose the establishment of such a state.

Public opinion polls back him up: in 2012, the vast majority of Israelis backed a Palestinian state. After several wars started by Hamas, including the October 7 terror attack, public opinion in Israel has shifted completely in the opposite direction. In the Arab world, despite the persistence of the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab states, 89% of the general population rejects any recognition of Israel.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.