In 1978, a 28-year-old Ben Nitay—the Americanized name that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adopted at the time—explained to a Boston audience that “the stumbling block to the road for peace is this demand for a PLO state.” Since then, his life’s mission has been to prevent it.
In the 1990s, first as leader of the opposition to then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s peace efforts and then, after Rabin’s death, as his successor, Netanyahu did everything in his power to delegitimize and derail the Oslo process. When he returned to office in 2009, his first task was to repel the Obama administration’s negotiation efforts and then, after the predictable failure of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempt to negotiate peace in 2013, to remove the Palestinian issue from the agenda.
In the decade that followed, Netanyahu abandoned even the pretense of negotiations, declaring in 2015, “No Palestinian state on my watch.” His engagement with the Palestinian Authority, his potential partner, was limited to crippling it financially and undermining its legitimacy while his governments scattered settlements deep in Palestinian territory, making partition exceedingly more difficult and violence all but inevitable. Netanyahu’s current government, formed in 2022, includes Israel’s most abhorrent elements, which, until recently, were pariahs in Israeli politics, openly calling for resettling Gaza and Syria and for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
