Benjamin Netanyahu was 39 years old when preparations were being made for the United Nations General Assembly in September 1989, an energetic diplomatic star who served as Israel’s ambassador to the UN.
It was precisely on his home turf, just before the end of his tenure, when one of Israel’s most severe diplomatic defeats occurred.
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat was invited to speak at the General Assembly, which was supposed to convene in New York.
Arafat was then 20 years older than Netanyahu, more recognised than him on the international stage, and not necessarily in a positive way.
The First Intifada that began spontaneously 10 months earlier marked the PLO leader as the national leader of the Palestinians and a symbol of the Palestinian people’s fate.
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Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its failed attempt to eliminate Arafat, the PLO and the national claim for a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River amplified Arafat’s symbolic status in the eyes of his public.
The excessive force with which Israel tried to suppress the popular uprising opened the doors of the UN General Assembly to Arafat.
His invitation came after 12 years in which Arafat sought a path through which the PLO could integrate into talks on a political settlement without abandoning its principles.
Israel and the US had long sought to block these efforts, and did so again in 1988. Ronald Reagan’s Republican administration refused to grant Arafat a visa, so a special session of the General Assembly was convened in Geneva.
Netanyahu is currently 76 years old, prime minister, sick and reviled as a war criminal with an international arrest warrant hanging over his head.
The State of Palestine
From day one in public service, Netanyahu’s life mission was cut and clear: to prevent everything that Arafat wanted to achieve. Until two years ago, he succeeded in doing so.
As prime minister, he established a regime of Jewish supremacy over the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, deepened the Palestinian division, and was on the verge of including Saudi Arabia in the Abraham Accords.
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The 7 October Hamas-led attack buried his project. On the initiative of Saudi Arabia and France, key western nations are about to recognise Palestine. In fact, most countries have already recognised it.
It is difficult to credit the current Palestinian achievements to Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinian Authority president is nearly 90 years old, infirm and works only a small number of hours per day.
Abbas heads a corrupt establishment lacking public legitimacy, which under him has become an operator on behalf of a Jewish supremacy regime.
The “State of Palestine” logo and honour guard that receives Abbas in the Muqata (the Palestinian Authority headquarter in Ramallah) becomes ridiculous when the Israeli military operates undisturbed a few streets away and, together with violent settlers, carries out pogroms against residents.
To Netanyahu’s great frustration, it is precisely this failed establishment that is about to gain state recognition from key western nations.
This move does not recognise the reality of a state in the making, as was the case with the Jewish Yishuv during the British Mandate period and the Palestinian Authority during its first stage. This is a recognition of the necessity to replace it with a different reality.
However, international recognition has an additional layer.
Arafat’s opportunity
As in 1988, the excessive force – genocide if we define it correctly – that Israel carries out against the Palestinian people with weapons, assistance and political backing from western countries is pushing forward that international recognition.
This is comparable to the guilt of nations after the Holocaust that motivated them in 1947 to support Israel’s establishment at the expense of the native Palestinian majority. Accompanying this is the guilt about European colonialism in general and its Zionist chapter in particular.
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As in 1988, the cooperation between the Trump administration and Netanyahu’s government has prompted the United States to ban Abbas’s entry to speak at the upcoming UN General Assembly.
French President Emmanuel Macron and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, plan to chair an event during the Assembly where western leaders will join them in recognising Palestine.
In an attempt to drain the expected recognition of its significance, the United States decided to comprehensively ban the entry of any person holding a State of Palestine passport.
Let’s return to 1988. In a rare moment of wisdom, the PLO concluded that the popular uprising created a political opportunity that its armed struggle had failed to produce.
In other words, it was not the force Israel imposed on the PLO that led to change but rather the PLO’s success in surviving Israel’s 1982 attack and being accepted by the Intifada rebels as their leader.
Its status among the Palestinian public, in general public opinion and in western political establishments brought the PLO closer to achieving independence for occupied Palestine and it was ready to declare this.
A fait accompli
On 15 November 1988, within the framework of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, the PLO recognised the UN Partition Resolution of 1947, which it had vehemently rejected in the Palestinian Charter of 1964 and 1968.
The PLO explicitly stated that the State of Palestine would dwell peacefully alongside the Jewish state.
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Thus, the PLO effectively accepted Security Council Resolution 242 from 1967, which serves as the cornerstone for all political plans for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
This was a significant development in the PLO’s path, which Israel consistently ignores. Arafat emphasised these principles in his speech before the special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva on 13 December.
In November and December that year, Netanyahu became an MP and was on his way to the position of deputy foreign minister under his patron Moshe Arens. Another diplomatic defeat occurred under their noses.
Immediately after Arafat’s speech at the General Assembly, the Swedish foreign minister and three Jewish peace activists who were counted on the “extreme left” – Rita Hauser, Stanley Sheinbaum and Drora Kass – opened contacts with US Secretary of State George Shultz.
They asked what, in his opinion, was missing from Arafat’s General Assembly speech. Arafat included the text that Shultz dictated word for word in a news conference he held in Geneva. In essence, Arafat said that the PLO recognises Israel’s existence, condemns terrorism and accepts Resolution 242.
In Washington, a twilight period prevailed. The Reagan administration was on its way to the history books, and president-elect Bill Clinton was preparing to enter office in January.
Contrary to unwritten rules, the outgoing administration presented the new administration with a fait accompli. The United States recognised the PLO and opened an official dialogue with it.
This was a severe blow to Israel’s political rejectionism under Likud leadership.
The zealots of Masada
With his back against the wall of the 7 October failure and facing a tsunami of western recognition of the State of Palestine, Netanyahu is fighting to save his life mission: preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state through Jewish supremacy force.
Netanyahu cannot bear the harsh truth: his greatest political achievement was thwarted by Hamas, whose attack harmed Israel as no Palestinian organisation had ever done.
Hamas did not gain politically from the unprecedented blow to Israel but succeeded in blocking its normalisation with Saudi Arabia.
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Netanyahu thinks that “total victory” will eliminate Hamas and its achievement. As total victory becomes more distant, Netanyahu pursues it with more war crimes and unleashing more force.
The attack in Qatar, threats to act against Hamas leaders even in Turkey, and his desire to push Gaza Strip residents to Egypt at the cost of destroying the peace agreement are part of his desperate policy.
Netanyahu is not alone in the battle against the Palestinian state. Israel’s Jewish society stands behind him, despite the fact that most of it would like to see him retire from political life.
Internationally, only the Trump administration stands beside him. Together, they are uprooting the relations built between the United States and Palestinians since 1988. They are aware of their limited ability to block or delay the recognition of Palestine.
Therefore, their main effort is directed at changing the reality on the ground to create no demographic and geographic basis on which the State of Palestine can be established.
Netanyahu brought about the total destruction of and devastation in the Gaza Strip, and on a smaller scale (for now?) in the occupied West Bank, where he plans to add de jure annexation as a response to western recognition of Palestine. In other words, to hollow out international recognition.
From his entry into Israel’s foreign service, Netanyahu worked to translate Israel’s military power into political capital to prevent the establishment of Palestine. When he almost touched his goal, his path was blocked.
In response, the desperate Netanyahu now relies on sheer force alone. He and Israeli society refuse to acknowledge that the 7 October attack came from the place where Israeli force had been applied for years in the most brutal and cruel manner.
Israel refuses to recognise that Hamas’s attack proved that exclusive reliance on force and imposing Jewish supremacy have turned Israel into a genocidal society, and a society whose historical model it adopts is that of the zealots of Masada.
