IN HIS watershed Bar- Ilan speech in June 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu articulated his fundamental stand on the peace process.After expounding at length on the Jewish nation’s historic bond with the ancestral Land of Israel, he said, “The simple truth is that the root cause of the conflict was and remains the refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish People to a state of their own in their historic homeland.” He then added the following: “But we must also tell the truth in its entirety.Within this homeland lives a large Palestinian community. We do not want to rule over them, we do not want to govern their lives… to impose either our flag or our culture on them.”In this order of things, however, there is no way any Palestinian leader, not Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas or anyone replacing him, could agree to make peace. From the Palestinian point of view, they are not simply a large community that happens to be residing in ancestral Israel; on the contrary, they see themselves as an indigenous nation victimized by classical colonization.The Bar-Ilan speech reflects Netanyahu’s total denial of Palestinian indigenousness and his view of the Jewish nation’s exclusive entitlement to the Land of Israel.Two decades ago, by initially removing the issue of indigenousness from the agenda, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin attempted to advance conflict resolution through partition of the land and realization of the two-state solution first, with reconciliation of conflicting narratives left for later.But Netanyahu leads a movement that objects fundamentally to the partition of the land. In a recent Knesset speech in the presence of British Prime Minister David Cameron, Netanyahu claimed that in the late 19th century a largely vacant Land of Israel awaited the rebirth of the Jewish nation in its ancestral land. The return of the Jews to Zion and the rebuilding of the land encouraged nomadic Arab immigration from the neighboring countries. “The Palestinians ought to acknowledge the historic bond of the Jewish people with its ancestral land, the Land of Israel, and its rights over it,” he declared.“There is no question of narratives. There is only one historical truth.”Netanyahu’s insistence on Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jews as a sine qua non for any peace treaty is considered by many commentators as a brilliant ploy to block the American peace initiative, while putting the blame on the Palestinians for refusing such a commonsensical request.However, it reflects not only cunning statesmanship, but, more importantly, a deep ideological commitment.Netanyahu believes there are no legitimate grounds for the Palestinian claim of indigenousness in the land. He describes their forefathers as nomadic jobseekers, who parked in the country to earn a living by flocking around the industrious Jewish settlements that sprouted in “the empty land.”For outsiders it might look bizarre. Members of an immigrant Jewish nation flocked into Palestine from all four corners of the earth, claimed exclusive ethnic indigenousness in the face of another indigenous nation, which it insists on regarding as alien. This competition between two contenders for the sole birthright has so far been decided by military power. The Oslo peace process, so despised by Netanyahu and the Likud, was deliberately brought to a halt during his first term as prime minister. It seems that already then Netanyahu could not accept the fact that it was based on peacemaking between two equal negotiating partners.Now, by emphasizing the concept of exclusive indigenousness, Netanyahu is denying the Palestinians the equal partner status which is so crucial for achieving peace. Mutual acknowledgement of equal status with regard to claims of indigenousness in the Holy Land would open the way for a sustainable peace agreement, based on ending the occupation, partitioning the land and implementing the two-state solution. Ilan Baruch, a former ambassador to South Africa, is a senior political adviser to the leader of the dovish Meretz party
