Aug. 10: PM: I want to end war ASAP, told IDF to shorten timeline for capturing Gaza City

Netanyahu slams world leaders for ‘absurd’ belief that giving Palestinians a state would stop their efforts to destroy Israel

In the final question of his English-language press conference, Netanyahu is asked about his bitter description of countries’ preparing to recognize Palestinian statehood as rewarding terror. But perhaps, it is put to him, those countries do recognize Israel’s right to defend itself, and “are now struggling to stomach what they’re seeing you and your military doing in Gaza?”

“First of all,” Netanyahu responds, “those who say that Israel has a right to defend itself are also saying, ‘But don’t exercise that right.’ When we do what any country would do, faced with this genocidal terrorist organization that has performed the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust,” he says, “I think we’re actually applying force judiciously, and they know it. They know what they would do if right next to Melbourne, or right next to Sydney, you had this horrific attack. I think you would do at least what we’re doing… [although] maybe not as efficiently and as precisely as we’re doing it. We’ve lost quite a few soldiers in that effort.”

He then dismisses “the prevailing assumption… that the problem that we have with the Palestinians is the absence of a Palestinian state. And [that] if they were given a Palestinian state, they would stop the efforts to destroy the Jewish state. But the Palestinians were offered a state many times, including in the partition resolution, and they turned it down,” he says. “They were offered statehood by my predecessors, with lavish, lavish concessions. They turned it down.”

This, he says, is “because the Palestinians are not about creating a state. They’re about destroying a state. That’s why they opposed the Jewish National Movement to create a state. It’s called Zionism. They opposed it before the inception of the Jewish state, and they’ve opposed it since. They’ve opposed it when they had Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, and Gaza in their hold. They didn’t say, Let’s start. Let’s create a state there. They didn’t say that. Because, again, their goal is the destruction of a state.

“It defies imagination or understanding how intelligent people around the world, including seasoned diplomats, government leaders, and respected journalists, fall for this absurdity,” he marvels. “It’s so easy to verify.”

He says Hamas had a de facto state in Gaza, which it used “to launch a war of terror against Israel,” and that it will do so again if it is able.

As for the Palestinian Authority, he goes on, it seeks first to reduce Israel to “indefensible boundaries” via organs like the ICC and UN, “and then deliver the blow. Because Israel is too strong in its present configuration.”

The PA and Hamas “have no difference about the goal.” He says that is why Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank “are educated with exactly the same textbooks,” and why the PA maintains a “pay for slay” policy to encourage the murder of Jews. “The real reason that this conflict persists is not because of the absence of a Palestinian state, but the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize the Jewish state in any boundary,” he charges.

Giving the Palestinians a state, he says, would not see them abandoning the “goal of destroying the Jewish state. All you’re doing is you’re bringing the next war closer.”

“Again, Hamas had a state. It just brought the war closer. If you did the same thing in Judea and Samaria, right above Tel Aviv, enveloping Jerusalem, some say cutting Jerusalem into two… you’re going to have the radicals again take it over, Iran take it over, and start a war from improved boundaries.”

The Palestinians should have “all the powers to govern themselves in the places where they live and none of the powers to threaten Israel,” he says. “They should obviously reform their whole education system. They should… accept that Israel is here to stay, not as a fact, as a physical or geographic fact, but as a fact of historical equity. If they want to live here, next to us, they have to stop seeking our destruction. To give them an independent state with all the trimmings is to invite a future war, and a certain war.

“That’s something that today, the Israeli public forcefully opposes,” he notes. Most of the Jewish public and the vast majority of MKs oppose a Palestinian state “for the simple reason that they know it won’t bring peace, it will bring war. To have European countries and Australia march into that rabbit hole… and buy this canard, it is disappointing. And I think it’s actually shameful.”

But, he vows, “it’s not going to change our position. We will not commit national suicide to get a good op-ed for two minutes,” he concludes. “We won’t do that.”