AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
"My father always said, 'Conversation fertilizes thought,'" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said while wrapping up his comments at Tuesday afternoon's meeting with American progressives at the Center for American Progress. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, there was a lot more fertilizer than thought in his remarks.
That assessment may be a touch unfair. Netanyahu has clearly given a lot of thought to how to evade questions that challenge the consequences, or even the rationality, of his policies. Asked how he envisioned Israel's future absent a two-state solution-that is, an Israel with a Palestinian majority, an Israel that will inevitably emerge if it persists in occupying the West Bank-Netanyahu spoke instead of the need for Israeli troops to patrol the West Bank and Gaza. He invoked the specter of Palestinians tunneling under borders, though the questioner had clearly asked him to assess the consequences of his policies that so retard the emergence of a two-state solution that a majority-Palestinian Israel could well emerge. Today, just 52 percent of the population of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank is Jewish. By 2030, if demographic trends evolve as expected, only 44 percent of that population will be Jewish.
That was the second question about Israel's future that Netanyahu evaded. Asked by Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, which hosted the event, to envision Israel 20 years hence, Netanyahu answered that its future depended substantially on the outcome of the conflicts now violently dividing the Arab world, which he described, not inaccurately, as "modernity against early medievalism." But of all the Arab peoples, the Palestinians are the ones who have most clearly come down on the side of modernity. Trans-border civil wars may wrack the Arab world, but they're not the impediment to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
Yet if there's to be such a settlement, Netanyahu doesn't even see the Palestinians as Israel's interlocutor. He expressed hope that "other Arab nations" might one day persuade the Palestinians to accept a settlement that leaves Israeli armed forces stationed in both the West Bank and Gaza-much as there are U.S. armed forces, Netanyahu pointed out, in "Germany, Okinawa, and South Korea."
Those are hardly parallel situations, however-indeed, they're closer to perpendicular. The U.S. troops in Germany and Okinawa arrived as part of the military conquest of the Axis powers in World War II; it's hard to envision Palestinians accepting a faux-statehood on terms equivalent to the unconditional surrenders of 1945. (Presumably, that's where the "other Arab nations"-the Saudis, I suppose-come in. In essence, Bibi's vision of how to reach a settlement is a deus ex machine that absolves Israel from the necessity of altering its policies.)
As well, those troops have remained in Germany, Japan, and South Korea because those nations have subsequently requested them to diminish external threats from rival nations, not because they officially acknowledge themselves to be the threat, as Netanyahu's vision of a settlement would entail.
If Netanyahu has trouble envisioning the Israeli-Palestinian future, he has no trouble calling up the low-points of the Palestinian past.
Bibi met questions about how to move towards a settlement with recitals of incidents of Palestinian violence against Jews, back to 1920. Do Israeli Arabs feel like second-class citizens? He replied with accounts of his appropriating funds for tunnels to relieve the periodic flooding of an Israeli Arab town.
And so it went, for a painful hour of evasion, boilerplate, and fertilizer.
