Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Bibi Rejects Harsh U.S. Criticism in Surprise Saban Forum Speech

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and rejected U.S. warnings that Israel was devolving toward a single state.

The “root cause of the problem,” Netanyahu said in a video address Sunday to the annual Saban Forum, is that “the Palestinians have not yet been willing to cross that conceptual bridge, the emotional bridge of giving up the dream of not a state next to Israel, but of a state instead of Israel.”

Netanyahu’s appearance at the annual convention of U.S. and Israeli leaders, convened in Washington, D.C., by the Brookings Institution and sponsored by Israeli-American entertainment mogul Haim Saban, was a last-minute addition. It came after a scorching speech to the forum the previous evening by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warning that Israel’s settlement policies were leading toward a one-state outcome.

Netanyahu denied that Israel was headed toward incorporating the West Bank Palestinian population.

“The only workable solution is not a unitary state but a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state,” he said.Netanyahu rebuts U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s warning about devolving to a one-state outcome.

Palestinians, after the launch of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s, at times have expressed recognition of Israel’s Jewish character. However, as relations deteriorated in the 2000s and Israeli leaders demanded a reiteration, Palestinian leaders have resisted reasserting recognition of Israel as Jewish.

Netanyahu likened claims that the settlements were hindering peace to the notion once prevalent in some circles that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the core of the broader Middle East conflict. The earlier idea of blaming Israel for regional turmoil was now seen as “childish and irrelevant,” he said.

“The same will happen with the core of the conflict being of the settlements,” he said. “They are an issue to be resolved, but not the core of the conflict.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.