Today, I write as an Arab citizen who only represents himself. I want to express my utter rejection of Netanyahu's speech, in its entirety, and I oppose any Arab state that accepts it. This is because the Arab initiative will not be on the table forever, as agreed upon by all Arabs. Furthermore, the Prime Minister of Israel did not offer us a “vision of peace,” but rather a vision of a hundred more years of wars. Every single condition that Netanyahu placed for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state threatens to blast the negotiations from their very foundations, while the sum total of these conditions is the ruin of President Barack Obama's vision which he set forth in his speech ten days prior to Netanyahu's. Moreover, this all brings back to memory his lies and deceptive manoeuvres that disrupted the peace process between 1996 and 1999, hence the still ongoing confrontation between Palestinians and Israel. This confrontation is likely to continue for another thousand years as long as the Israeli expansionist thinking and settlement policies are still in place. If Netanyahu was like Pinocchio, his nose would have circled the globe in half an hour, which was the duration of his speech. He is a secular person who has nothing to do with religion. Yet he speaks as if he was one of Shas's rabbis as he leans on biblical myths that have no historical basis, then he refers to Judea and Samaria, “the land of our forefathers,” as he put it, although there was no trace of Jews living in Jerusalem. The Torah itself admits that the Jews entered a country already inhabited by the Palestinians three thousand years ago, and even this I don't personally believe. More importantly, Netanyahu insulted the intelligence of the whole world, when he said that he wants to immediately and unconditionally negotiate with the Palestinians, then he placed impossible conditions, from recognizing Israel as a Jewish state and accepting settlements to a demilitarized Palestinian state that cannot forge alliances or sign treaties (with the enemies of Israel), with Israel controlling its borders and airspace, while being “generous” enough to grant it its own national anthem and flag. He spoke about an autonomous self-rule which is as rejected as Israel itself. While he insisted on cooperation with the Obama administration because the American President is genuinely sincere in his quest for the two-state solution, I want to sound the alarm. The 90s scenario might be repeated, so I call on Arab countries not to wait another three or four years if it is proven that the government of the neo-Nazis in Israel will reject an independent Palestinian state. I also call on the Palestinian National Authority to start demanding all of Palestine, which is an occupied land from the sea to the river. If the Palestinians had accepted a state on 22 percent of the land, this does not mean that all of the land is not still called Palestine. I personally will recognize Israel only after the establishment of the independent state of Palestine and not a second before. The above is an answer to Netanyahu's reply to Obama. The U.S. president had said that Israel was established as the result of the Holocaust, while the Prime Minister of Israel laid his claims in historical roots, which I insist have never existed. Meanwhile, the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs welcomed Netanyahu's acceptance of the two-state solution, but this is just a political stance so as not to abort negotiations before they begin. For example, Netanyahu said that he would not build new settlements, but this is not the issue, since even existing settlements put an end to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, as they would disconnect its land and deprive it of its most basic requirements, i.e. water. This is because the existing settlements, which Israel wants to grant the right of “natural growth,” steal 80 percent of the West Bank's water, according to the World Bank estimate, whose chief is Jewish, and not my own estimate. I do not want to be negative, and I am not trying to respond to Netanyahu's extremism with an Arab citizen's extremism. But with the impossibility of establishing a state under Israel's conditions, I find that the issue of the return of refugees is not a tough knot which cannot be untied. The return of three or four million Palestinians to the land of Palestine, which is now Israel, would abolish the existence of Israel. Thus, it is impossible for any Israeli government to accept the return of Palestinian refugees, even if it is to be led by Meretz. However, the Arab initiative, which was accepted by 22 Arab countries including the Palestinian government, does not state that all the refugees must return, but that a just solution for their cause must be reached - which means a solution accepted by both the victim and the killer - through negotiations. It is my belief that Netanyahu was addressing his own extremist coalition, and not Obama, the Palestinians or the Arab world. He prefers the survival of his own coalition over any acceptable solution, and therefore there will be no accord with him, neither today nor ever.
