Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu speaks at the Center for American Progress in Washington, Tuesday,
Nov. 10, 2015. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu spoke with Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden on Tuesday
as part of his latest visit to the United States, during which he’s attempting
to appeal to both conservatives and progressives. In a
wide-ranging forum, the hawkish prime minister invoked several of his favorite
claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Netanyahu is known to have distorted
facts in the past, from rewriting the history of the Holocaust to grossly overstating Iran’s nuclear capacity.
ThinkProgress, an editorially
independent news site affiliated with the Center for American Progress,
fact-checked his discussion with Tanden and found a number of false claims.
1. Settlements aren’t a core
issue affecting the peace process.
CLAIM: Netanyahu claimed
that the settlements are not a “core issue” in the stalled peace talks. He
defended the statement by dating the violence between Arabs and Jews in the
area to a time before the settlements existed. “This is 50 years, 47 years,
from 1920–1967. Half a century. What’s the problem? … It can’t be the
territories because there weren’t any.”
FACT: The United
Nations, along with most of the world, considers Jewish settlements built on territory that Israel
captured in 1967 to be illegal. This summer, the Palestinians presented documents to the International Criminal Court to
investigate their continued construction as a war crime. The United States
government — in both Republican and Democrat administrations — has also
repeatedly insisted that settlement expansion hurts the peace process. In fact,
when peace talks failed in 2014, a U.S. State Department official who led the
talks said that Netanyahu’s policy regarding settlements has a
“dramatically damaging impact.”
2. No new settlements have
been built for two decades.
CLAIM: Netanyahu
frequently says that no new settlements have been approved in the past 20
years, and repeated this claim on Tuesday.
FACT: The 20 years claim
holds up only by using superficial definitions of “settlements.” The government
has long given settlers a long leash by allowing new construction in the vicinity of
older settlements to be defined as “neighborhoods” and “outposts” when they
are, in practice, new settlements, sometimes on Palestinians’ private land. In
fact, the American Religious Right has bankrolled settlement construction, as
ThinkProgress’ Jack Jenkins has reported.
Settlement unit construction
has continued steadily throughout the past decade despite Netanyahu’s claim
that “there have been no new settlements built in the last 20 years.” Last
year, as Secretary of State John Kerry attempted to broker a peace, Netanyahu’s
government endorsed 13,851
new settlement housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — four
times the amount of previous years.
3. Israel gave Gaza
completely to the Palestinians.
In this file photo taken
Sunday, July 23, 2006, An Israeli F-16 warplane takes off from an air force
base in southern Israel. CREDIT: AP Photo/Ariel Schalit, File
CLAIM: Netanyahu claimed
that Israel “took away all the settlements, took them apart” and “even
disinterred people from their graves” in Gaza.
FACT: While Israel did
withdraw its settlements from Gaza, it still retains control over Gaza’s airspace, sea shore, and the
Kerem Shalom and Erez border crossings. The Israeli government has routinely
shut down those two border crossings, citing safety concerns. International
humanitarian groups warn that the constant closures cut off Gaza from
humanitarian aid and has created an economic
catastrophe for Palestinians.
4. Palestinians name public
squares after murderers, but Israelis don’t.
CLAIM: The prime
minister argued that Palestinians celebrate terrorists while Israelis do not.
“We do not name our public squares after mass murderers,” he told Tanden. “On
the few occasions we have had mass murderers like Goldstein, we condemned it,
from the right to the left. But the public square — is named after a killer who
murdered hundreds of innocent Jews. There is a difference in values. They
glorify these people. We do not.”
FACT: As the Jewish
Daily Forward has pointed out, Netanyahu is overlooking several streets in
Jerusalem named after Israeli assassins and freedom fighters. “Nearly all the
streets in East Talpiot are named after Jews convicted and hanged as terrorists
by the British before 1948,” J.J. Goldberg writes. That’s because those labeled
terrorists are often celebrated as heroes once a country has won its
independence.
The commemoration is not
limited to Jerusalem. Goldberg points out: “Elsewhere in Israel are streets named for
Hirsh Lekert, hanged in Vilna in 1902 for trying to assassinate the tsarist
governor; Sholom Schwartzbard, who confessed to assassinating Ukrainian rebel
leader Simon Petlura in Paris in 1926, but was acquitted by a French jury.”
5. Settlements make up just
a tiny fraction of land.
CLAIM: Netanyahu
insisted that settlement construction has made up a tiny “fraction” of built up
land and is restricted to “existing communities.” He repeated a common claim,
saying, “the addition, if you look over time, it is maybe a fraction, maybe
1/10th of 1 percent.”
FACT: Though technically
settlements’ built up land makes up 1 percent of the West Bank, settlers’
control spreads far beyond that. As J Street points out, about ten percent of the West Bank is included
in the “municipal area,” and all in all, 40 percent of the land has been
rendered off-limits to Palestinians “regardless of the fact that only a small
portion of this land has been built on by settlers.” Furthermore, the
government has built roads to settlements over hundreds of kilometers that
further eats into Palestinian territory.
6. Palestinians won’t
recognize Israel.
CLAIM: The prime
minister told Tanden that he’s still waiting for Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas — also called Abu Mazen — to recognize Israel. “When I
say to Abu Mazen, for God’s sake, recognize the Jewish state already, as I
recognize the Palestinian state, and for God’s sake, let’s talk about long-term
security arrangements, so we have those two acres for real peace,” he said. “He
will not do it.”
FACT: The Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) formally recognized the State of Israel in 1993 and
Palestinian leaders have previously conceded that Israel is, in fact, a home
for Jewish people. A 2003 blueprint for a final Israeli-Palestinian agreement agreed
to by the Palestinians, states, “parties recognize Palestine and Israel as the
homelands of their respective peoples.” Similarly, in 2004, the late Yasir Arafat
replied “definitely” when asked by the Israeli paper Haaretz if
Israel “had to remain a Jewish State.”
But the official demand that
Palestinians recognize Israel as a homeland for Jews did not crop up in peace
talks until 2007, and Netanyahu did not make it a central demand until
2009 — leading some observers to interpret the move as an effort to slow
down the talks. Most recently, Abbas has refused to “accept the Jewishness of Israel,” arguing, as
the New York Times sums up, that such recognition would negate “a right of
return for Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants” and
undermine “the status of the Palestinian-Arab citizens who make up 20 percent
of Israel’s population.”
7. All Netanyahu wants to do
is talk to Palestinian leaders.
Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas, center, is surrounded by children during celebrations for the successful
bid to win U.N. statehood recognition for Palestine in the West Bank city of
Ramallah, Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012. Abbas has returned home to a hero’s welcome
after winning a resounding endorsement for Palestinian independence at the
United Nations. CREDIT: AP Photo/Nasser Shiyoukhi
CLAIM: “My throat has
become hoarse, inviting him again and again and he refuses,” the prime minister
said, referring to Mahmoud Abbas. “Conversation fertilizes thought.”
FACT: After initially insisting, on the eve of his re-election, that a
Palestinian state would not come to existence under his watch, Netanyahu has
said that he is ready to resume talks with the goal of establishing an
independent Palestine. However, he has also said that such talks would focus on
which settlement areas Israel could keep and which it could expand. As one
Western diplomat told Reuters in May, “[u]p until now, Netanyahu has refused
to put any maps on the table, so in that respect it was quite substantial.”
However, “he knows the Palestinians would never agree to begin on this basis.”
Palestinians and Arab leaders have always appeared skeptical of Netanyahu’s
willingness to accept Palestine as a state, pointing out that he didn’t
publicly embrace the two state solution until 2009. Netanyahu also championed a “Nationality Law” enshrining Israel as a state
of Jews in which “there are national rights only for the Jewish people. The
move was fiercely opposed by Israel’s Arab and Christian communities as well as
members of Netanyahu’s own government.
8. Violence against
Palestinians is forcefully punished.
CLAIM: Netanyahu objected
to Tanden’s claim that settlers’ attacks on Palestinians were treated
leniently, saying, “That’s not true.” “What is illegal is illegal,” he said.
“We prosecute even if somebody paints graffiti or takes down all of trees, it
is a crime, but I would not put it on the same level as Duma,” referring to the
recent arson attack that killed three Palestinians.
FACT: A surge of violence against Palestinians erupted recently in the West Bank, as settlers have
reportedly attacked Palestinians and vandalized their homes and businesses. Yet
only 1.9 percent of cases of settler violence result in
prosecution.
9. Young Palestinians are
terrorists.
CLAIM: “I am much more
concerned on how to get to Palestinian young minds who want to disabuse these
lives and to get them to accept the idea that we are going to have to live
side-by-side in this small piece of land. And we we have to do it in peace and
prosperity. That is a tough order,” Netanyahu said at Tuesday’s event.
FACT: Most
Palestinians — including youth — appear to prefer nonviolent activism: 62 percent of people in the
West Bank and 73 percent of Gazans say “popular resistance against the
occupation” such as marches, demonstrations, and strikes are having a positive
impact. A 2013 poll found that 73 percent of Palestinian youth in the
West Bank and Gaza say they do not belong to any political faction such as
Hamas, Fatah, or otherwise. In addition, a
Zogby survey found 45 percent of young Palestinians desire a two-state
solution, only slightly fewer than results among older generations. But even
that figure is misleading: far from harbingers of violence, increasing numbers
of young Palestinians are calling for a one-state solution — one where they could,
in fact, live side-by-side with Israelis in the same country, and thus finally
be afforded rights regularly denied to them under Israeli occupation.
10. LGBT rights aren’t threatened in Israel.
Revelers in support of the LGBT
community march up Fifth avenue during the Celebrate Israel Parade, Sunday,
June 1, 2014, in New York. CREDIT: AP Photo/John Minchillo
CLAIM: Tanden praised
the Israeli Defense Forces for being inclusive of women and LGBT soldiers,
asking Netanyahu what the U.S. could learn from Israel on that front. Netanyahu
insinuated that LGBT rights are not necessarily infringed upon, replying, “You
have ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ We have, ‘we don’t care.’”
FACT: LGBT rights are
still suppressed in Israeli society. In fact, Netanyahu’s government shot down a slew of bills this year intended to expand LGBT
rights, including one that would have legalized same-sex marriage and another
that would protect Israelis from being discriminated against on the basis of
their identity or sexual orientation. A member of his own coalition, MK Bezalel
Smotrich, organized an anti-gay rally in 2006, a year after several people were
stabbed at a Pride parade. Smotrich’s rally was intended to protest the Pride
parade in Jerusalem, which he called “the
beast parade.”
Update: This post has
been updated to more accurately reflect J.J. Goldberg’s argument.
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