The echoes of Israel Resilience Party leader Benny Gantz's debut speech continue to be heard, possibly due to many people having assumed it would be a direct continuation of his silence but instead witnessing Gantz causing something of an earthquake. No one was smiling when Gantz said he sees himself as Israel's next leader. The argument that he lacks experience in civilian life was only made on the sidelines. Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu realized that, for the first time in a long time, he now faced an opponent with potential.
An analysis of the carefully formulated speech shows that for now, one can be both on the Left and on the Right. His proposed Knesset list will undergo political upheavals until the very last minute. It is clear that the main question was how he would define his political vision, when two-thirds of his support comes from the Center-Left, and one-third from the Right. Indeed, the speech was a masterpiece. It allowed him to avoid a few traps while still allowing him to have said something.
The meaning of his words was as follows: We need to agree upon a border between us and the Palestinians to ensure that Israel remains a democracy with a viable Jewish majority. The optimal way to achieve this goal is through an agreement in which the settlement blocs situated in the heart of the West Bank become part of sovereign Israel. He did not touch at all on the territorial compensation Israel would need to offer the Palestinians inside its current sovereign territory, in return for their annexation. And the Jordan Valley will be Israel's security border (Meaning that there would be no foreign military presence west of the Jordan, but there would be no need to ensure Israeli sovereignty over the valley.) A unified Jerusalem will be our eternal capital (something that allowed former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and all the "Labor" leaders who did not serve as party heads to explain that the Palestinian neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, 28 Arab villages and refugee camps arrogantly annexed following the 1967 Six-Day War, were not and are not party of a unified city).
In the absence of an agreement, Israel will continue to wait for the first-ever Zionist Palestinian leader to come around and unilaterally act so it can realize its goals.
In his speech, Gantz made no mention of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and did not say whether he considered him a partner for peace, but he didn't rule the option out, either. Unlike a number of Israeli figures on the left of the political map, he didn't decree that with the situation "as it currently stands," now is not the time to talk about peace. But he also wasn't shy about saying that a government under his leadership would strive toward this end.
But when he sought to base his arguments on precedents, he decided to leave out the event that changed the Middle East, and told a very artificial tale about previous prime ministers, all of whom he referred to, and justifiably so, as "Israeli patriots": Menachem Begin and Egypt; Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan; and Netanyahu, who he said "signed the Hebron evacuation agreement and the Wye agreement with arch-murderer Yasser Arafat."
I admit that from my perspective, this was the less successful part of his remarks. If you are already mentioning prime ministers who made moves for peace or worked toward the regulation of ties with the Palestinians, one cannot ignore the late Yitzhak Shamir, who agreed to participate in the Madrid Conference; Barak, who withdrew from Lebanon; and Ariel Sharon, who was the first to openly talk about a Palestinian state and who also withdrew from the Gaza Strip. Peace with Jordan was the immediate outcome of the Oslo Accords, which would not have come into being were it not for the courage of Rabin, who paid for this bravery with his life. Without Oslo, which was left out of Gantz's speech, there would be no Hebron or Wye agreements for Netanyahu to sign. And speaking of "arch-murderers," one cannot ignore the fact former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat caused the deaths of many more Israelis than Arafat ever did and was also a blatant Nazi sympathizer during World War II.
I understand that the wording of Gantz's important speech was first and foremost an intellectual exercise in rounding corners, but there is a difference between taking care not to step into a minefield of details and skipping over an accord that changed the face of the region.
