On Monday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is scheduled to make his first speech at the UN General Assembly. With all the criticism about the organization's weakness and about the block of "unidentified" nations having disproportionate influence in it, the General Assembly serves as a rare meeting point and an important platform for the 193 UN member states.
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For Bennett, this will be a very important test performance. It won't be enough for him not to be pompous, like his predecessor, or for him to skip the PowerPoint presentation. If he does not make a quotable remark about Israel's interest in peace with its immediate neighbors, it will be a missed opportunity. We can assume that the last drafts of his speech are being completed. In polished English, the prime minister intends to talk about the need to come together in the face of the Iranian threat and move toward both regional peace and economic peace; about his desire to keep the Palestinian people from suffering; and about the fact that he is kept from doing so by their leaders. But the prime minister listened very closely to US President Joe Biden's remarks at the General Assembly about his belief in the two-state solution, as well as the UN secretary general's moving remarks about the same issue.
Given a phalanx of countries that support us and the two-state solution, Bennett can't allow himself to lead the front of refusal with his three "no's": no to a Palestinian state, no to negotiations, and no to a meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas. If that's what happens, the speech will likely do more harm than good, and Bennett shouldn't bother to spend the last day of Sukkot in the Diaspora.
Instead of saying he does not intend to meet with the Palestinian president because of the salaries the PA pays to terrorist prisoners, he could flip his statement and invite Abbas to a meeting in Jerusalem that would take place at the same time as an effort to solve the problem of the PA's salaries to prisoners.
This would offer Bennett a way of not going back on his word, while also not finding himself isolated, or isolating Israel by – unlike his predecessor – turning his back on a leader committed to peace with Israel who declares publicly that security coordination between Israel and the PA is "sacrosanct." If the prime minister intends to increase the pressure on the PA to stop its institutionalized aid for prisoners, it would be much more effective than boycotting him. Flipping the order of the sentence could enlist the countries to whom a peace deal is important to work toward that end. This is Bennett's chance.
Meanwhile, two days from now Germany will be holding a general election. The competition is between Armin Laschet, head of the Christian Democratic Union Party, and Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrat vice chancellor. This week, Norway's Labor Party won elections in that country, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a Liberal, managed to win another term against his Conservative opponent. Anyone who rushed to eulogize the left is seeing a new axis between democratic socialism in Europe and in America, under Biden.
For the information of my fellow supplement columnist, Caroline Glick, the Oslo Accords process began on Jan. 20, 1993, a few days after the Knesset passed the second and third readings of a bill to cancel the prohibition on contact with PLO officials. The bill had its inception as a private member's bill, which I authored, and the Rabin government submitted. If that law hadn't passed in the Knesset, I would not have initiated the Oslo process.
So rather than trying to make up (in her column last week) crimes that never existed, perhaps she should deal with the truly interesting question: if the Oslo Accords were such a disaster, and if Benjamin Netanyahu announced at the Knesset podium in 1993 that he could cancel the agreement if he was elected prime minister, why didn't he or other right-wing prime ministers propose cancelling the accords after they were elected, and why did they leave Israel obligated to them? The claim that Netanyahu couldn't cancel an international agreement was disproved when he managed to lobby former US President Donald Trump to pull the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, thereby leading to its cancellation.
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