Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that Israel would not accept a Palestinian state that had been declared unilaterally by other countries, telling world leaders they risked rewarding Palestinians with a “grand prize for terror.”
Netanyahu addressed reporters at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem in what has become a near-weekly press conference. He said that Israel would maintain that the only path to Palestinian statehood would be direct talks, not an imposed settlement.
Netanyahu spoke in the wake of a repeated call by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Saturday to accept Palestinian statehood, during the annual Munich Security Conference, as an “extraordinary opportunity” to build relations with the Arab world. (The Abraham Accords, negotiated by President Donald Trump between Israel and several Arab states, did not rely on Palestinian statehood.)
Israel’s ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, met with Blinken on Saturday at the sidelines of the Munich conference, and told him that any “opportunities” had to await the completion of the task of “eradicating” Hamas.
In his press conference, Netanyahu noted a deadly terror attack Friday in which two Israelis were killed, observing that Israel’s enemies wanted to “kill us all.”
He also praised the heroism of Israeli soldiers, and relayed a message from wounded soldiers who urged him to fight until victory.
He recounted the rescue on Monday of two Israeli hostages from Rafah, in Gaza, and the tension in the room as he monitored the operation from afar, with a “hair’s breadth” separating success and failure. He recalled meeting the special forces soldiers who carried out the operation, and embracing them, and praised the members of what he called a “wonderful generation” of Israelis who had stepped up to face the challenge of the October 7 attack and its aftermath.
Netanyahu vowed to continue pursuing Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas, adding that Israeli soldiers were pursuing Hamas leaders from one hideout to another underneath Gaza. He added that soon the Hamas leaders would run out of places to hide.
He recalled recent conversations with U.S. President Joe Biden, who has publicly opposed an Israeli operation in Rafah, where the last Hamas battalions are based. Netanyahu said that to ask Israel to stay out of Rafah is to ask it to lose the war. He also opposed the Biden administration’s to grant the Palestinians a state as an outcome of the war, saying that it was unconscionable to hand Hamas terrorists the victory of Palestinian statehood after launching a war with the mass murder of innocent people.
Netanyahu closed his prepared remarks by urging Israelis not to heed voices who, he said, wanted to reintroduce divisions among Israelis. The entire nation, he said, wanted “unity for victory,” and the need for such unity overrode any political differences.\
Asked about the stalled negotiations over a Hamas hostage release, Netanyahu said that when Israel’s representatives went to talks in Cairo, Egypt, recently, with a mandate simply to listen to proposals, “They sat, and heard, and there were no changes.”
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who lives in luxurious exile in Doha, Qatar, reiterated Saturday that the terrorist organization would not release hostages until the war ended and Israel withdrew all of its forces from Gaza — a “non-starter” for Israel.
Netanyahu responded to questions about Israel’s recent credit downgrading by Moody’s by stating that Israel’s macroeconomic health remained solid, and that the only issue was the war. He said Israel’s credit would improve after the war had been won.
He dismissed recent calls by critics to hold early elections before the end of the year by saying that dividing the nation over politics in the midst of the war would give an advantage to Israel’s enemies, and that unity was not just “spin,” but a necessity.
Asked about a military operation in Rafah, Netanyahu asserted that it would be possible to evacuate civilians to many other places in Gaza, and that the only challenge was to do so in an orderly fashion, but nothing would stop Israel from entering the area.
Following Netanyahu’s conference, Herzog spoke at the Munich conference with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
Herzog said the free world had to oppose any accommodation of terror, and reminded the audience that many Palestinians had celebrated the October 7 attack, making it impossible for Israelis to trust them. “We should offer a vision of peace … but I think we have to add an element of reality. …. It won’t happen if we don’t find real solutions for the security question of Israel.”
Like Netanyahu, Herzog said that a Palestinian state now would give an “award” to Hamas. He said peace would depend first on a major agreement between Israel and other Arab states, and then a solution for Palestinians could be found in that framework.
Herzog referred to the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies as an “empire of evil,” noting that the fundamentalists in Tehran were fueling radical Islam throughout the region and the world, and were promoting Nazi-style antisemitism in their propaganda.
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 recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the 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.