Category: Israel-2009

This is a very informative article by Haaretz’s Amos Harel on the close symbiosis that exists between settler activists– including those responsible for most of the so-called “illegal” or “unauthorized” settlement outposts– and high-level authorities inside the IDF and other organs of the Israeli state.
He writes,

The outposts are a continuation of the settlements by other means. The sharp distinction Israel makes between them is artificial. Every outpost is established with a direct connection to a mother settlement, with the clear aim of expanding the takeover of the territory and ensuring an Israeli hold on a wider tract of land. Construction in the outposts is integrated into the overall plan of the settlement project and is carried out in parallel to the seizure of lands within and close to the settlements.

He illustrates the cooperation of state authorities in the establishment and maintenance of the so-called “outposts” in the case of one called Migron:

Migron is surrounded by a fence, guarded and connected to the necessary water and electricity infrastructures. Its “ascent to the land,” even though it was done on private Palestinian property, and despite the fact that it was undertaken in a deceptive manner, has received backing and practical support from the state. The security establishment’s declaration to the High Court of Justice this week that it would take more than a year to implement the compromise agreement, whereby the inhabitants of Migron would be moved to the adjacent settlement of Adam, shows that this backing is still in place…
Behind every settlement action there is a planning and thinking mind that has access to the state’s database and maps, and help from sympathetic officers serving in key positions in the IDF and the Civil Administration. The story is not in the settlers’ uncontrolled behavior, though there is evidence of this on some of the hilltops, but rather in conscious choices by the state to enforce very little of the law.

Harel writes that the the Obama administration has held fast to the position that all the 100 “outposts” identified by the United Nations and by Israeli attorney Talia Sasson must be evacuated. (And not just the 23 or 26 outposts that PM Sharon’s security adviser Dov Weisglas agreed to evacuate, back in 2001.)
He writes that most of the present outposts were established during two waves of activity: between 1997 and 1999 (when, of course, Netanyahu was the PM), and between 2001 and 2003 (i.e., under Sharon– and notwithstanding Wesiglas’s 2001 promise to evacuate some of the ones that were already there.)
He adds,

During those years, the area of the settlements themselves increased. The symbiosis between the army and the settlers in the West Bank was at its peak then. Many of the terror attacks elicited “a suitable Zionist response” with the army’s encouragement: the establishment of a new outpost or the pushing back of the fence around an existing settlement.
The settlers’ moves were supported by surveillance cameras, protected roads, guards and often by declarations of a “special security zone.” To prevent infiltration, the area of the settlements was expanded and Palestinians from neighboring villages were prevented from approaching them. However, in the same breath, the moves were exploited for long-term goals, taking over and building on lands that were in large part private.
For nearly 12 years now, I have been intermittently covering the outposts, as part of my coverage of the army. Officially, the IDF doesn’t see the connection between the defense establishment and the settlers. Construction in the territories is ostensibly a matter for settlement reporters and nosy activists from Peace Now. In fact, this connection is at the heart of the settlement project.
In March 1998, during a tour, I was told by the commander of the Samaria Area Brigade, in an afterthought, that although the Gidonim outposts near Itamar were established without a permit, the Defense Ministry was acting to “launder” them. On that same day, Eli Cohen, the defense minister’s settlement adviser, was also touring the area. Queries put to the ministry by Knesset members were answered with evasive comments, but very quickly all the outposts in the vicinity were connected to all the necessary infrastructures.
Five years later, at the height of the Sharon prime ministership, a senior officer who had recently been demobilized after service in the territories volunteered to explain the facts of life to my colleague Guy Kotev and me. With the patience usually reserved for children who have difficulty understanding, he asked us whether we really believed that the outposts go up without the authorities’ knowledge. He related that the director general of the settler organization Amana, Zeev Hever (known by his nickname, Zambish) was visiting the prime minister’s residence at night to go over the maps with Sharon. “And after that you expect that we won’t give them guards and we won’t hook them up to the water system?” he wondered.

So it is excellent to also learn from Harel that he judges that Obama has remained adamant on the need for speedy evacuation of all the outposts.
(As a precursor to the evacuation of all the settlements, I hope.)
He notes the very dire effects of the laxness that the last two US presidents have shown on the whole Israeli settlement construction question:

During the 16 years since the Oslo process began, the number of Israelis living east of the Green Line (pre-Six-Day War border) increased from 110,000 to about 300,000 (not including East Jerusalem). The number of building starts in the West Bank in 2008 was 40 percent greater than during the previous year.

2008, lest we forget, was exactly the year-long period in which George W. Bush had vowed– during his speech at the Annapolis Middle east Peace Summit (remember that??)– that he would broker a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement before the end of his term in office.
How can anyone say that Israel’s PM Ehud Olmert was negotiating “in good faith” with the Palestinians during that year, if at the same time he was accelerating his country’s expropriation of, and construction upon, the Palestinian land and national heritage?
Harel ends with a sober reflection on the split, or warped, moral vision of all the people– inside and outside the state apparatus– who have participated in the settlement- and outpost-construction project:

Taking over the private property of someone who belongs to the neighboring people is a common phenomenon in the West Bank, even in recent years. We aren’t talking here about things that happened back in 1948. It is possible, of course, to describe these moves as a necessary part of the life-and-death struggle between the two peoples, in the name of which nearly all means are justified.
One of the most obvious things learned from every visit is the extent to which things are done in a planned way, to this day. It is hard to miss the destroyed terraces in the settlement of Adam or the sight of the sewage flowing from Psagot, not far from the Binyamin regional council building, straight into the wadi that runs to the adjacent Palestinian town of El Bireh. But in those very same settlements live upstanding citizens, who would not cheat the grocer of 10 agorot and who would go out in the middle of the night to help a neighbor stuck on a dark road. In the outposts live scores of officers in the career army and the reserves, who serve in elite units and win citations for their courage. At the same time, according to the official state data, many of them have built their dream homes, a modest mobile home or a more luxurious villa, on land that has been stolen from someone else by force.

Great work, Amos Harel.

There’s been quite a bit of commentary in the US blogosphere about the unsourced observation in this Haaretz article today that Israeli PM Netanyahu has been heard to refer to Obama’s two high political advisers Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod as “self-hating Jews.”
Be that as it may. It strikes me that the much bigger story in the article, which is by Barak Ravid, is the picture he paints of disarray and something approaching panic in the high ranks of Netanyahu’s administration.
This, at a time in which Pres. Obama and his team have been maintaining their firm pressure on Netanyahu to completely freeze Israel’s construction of its quite illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
So far, neither side has backed down in this confrontation– though Obama has not yet taken any of the real-world policy measures that are potentially at his command, to back up his demand on Netanyahu.
Their conflict thus currently has many of the aspects of a staring match. Who will blink first? Or will Obama do something else that might radically change the nature of this engagement?
Ravid starts out today’s article by reporting on a press conference the centrist Kadima Party– currently in opposition– organized yesterday, 100 days into Netanyahu’s premiership, under the banner “100 days, zero gains. It’s the same old Bibi.”
Netanyahu responded in what looked like a distinctly panicky way, dispatching five of his advisers to quickly hold their own counter-press conference– though with no clear and discernible theme.
Ravid:

An atmosphere of permanent crisis has surrounded Netanyahu’s bureau ever since he took office, so it was no surprise that the press conference also had an air of panic. The five advisers – National Security Adviser Uzi Arad, cabinet secretary Zvi Hauser, director general of the Prime Minister’s Office Eyal Gabai, political adviser Ron Dermer and Nir Hefetz, who heads the public relations desk – arrived at the meeting without a prearranged, uniform message. Over and over, they cut each other off.
… [D]espite the unified front they tried to present, it is clear that all of Netanyahu’s aides dislike each other: They are constantly badmouthing each other and blaming each other for leaks. Arad, for example, demanded that Hauser undergo a lie-detector test and is now demanding the same of Hefetz. And the latter two say “it is impossible to work with” Arad.
Compounding the problem is an inexperienced bureau chief, Natan Eshel, and a former spokesman, Yossi Levy, who is still clinging to his office and refusing to give it up to his replacement, Hefetz – who, for his part, is kept out of half the discussions.
Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office…

It was in this context that Ravid wrote,

To appreciate the depth of [Netanyahu’s] paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.”

Now it is possible that Ravid was doing this reporting from a personal perspective that might be pretty much pro-Kadima.
Kadima, remember, stayed out of Netanyahu’s coalition because its leaders decided they wanted to hear Netanyahu firmly expressing support for the goal of a two-state solution with the Palestinians. (Which he finally did a couple of weeks ago, but only in a very circumspect way.)
There is certainly one way of looking at a possible US strategy wherein if Washington presses Netanyahu very hard on the settlement freeze and other peace-process issues, at some point his present rightist coalition partners would leave the coalition and Livni could step in and impose a few conditions of her own.
Or even take over completely as PM and form her own governing coalition.
Kadima did, after all, get one more seat in the February elections than Likud did. And unlike Labour leader Ehud Barak, who effectively broke his party in two because he was so eager to be Netanyahu’s Defense Minister, Livni has done a good job of holding Kadima together, despite the party’s many apparent internal ideological contradictions.
I imagine it is this idea that a powerful and credible Livni is just waiting in the wings for his coalition to split that is spooking Netanyahu these days– and a big reason why he is so resentful of the pressure he evidently feels he is under from Washington.
Anyway, to me that’s the importance of Ravid’s story today. The “self-hating Jews” business strikes me– if indeed Netanyahu said it– as pretty par for the course within Israel’s famously hard-fighting political culture.

To some extent, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is right. The big issue in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is not the freeze on additional settlement construction that’s being demanded by the US and its buddies in the ‘Quartet’. The big issue in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is making the Israeli-Palestinian peace. A final peace, that is.
And as everyone including Israel’s own settlers realizes, winning that peace will involve a significant evacuation of the settlements that Israel has invested so heavily in putting into the occupied West Bank for the past 42 years.
Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak is being dispatched to Washington today to try to win some flexibility for Israel’s large settlement-building interests. Haaretz daily also reported today that Barak’s defense ministry has approved the immediate building of 50 new homes in the settlement of Adam– part of a plan that will eventually put 1,450 new homes there.
Around 500,000 Jewish Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem). Any move by an occupying power to settle its own citizens in occupied areas has since 1949 been deemed quite illegal under international law.
In today’s NYT, Ethan Bronner reported on an interview he got with Barak on the eve of the latter’s departure to Washington, that:

Mr. Barak himself declined to address the question of a temporary freeze, … saying only that settlements should be viewed as one issue in a larger framework needed to create a Middle East peace.
“For us, it is very important that the Palestinians commit to seeking an end to the conflict and a finality of any claims,” he said. “We should not isolate this issue of settlements and make it the most important one. It has to be discussed in the context of a larger peace discussion.”
He added, “Many Israelis fear that what Palestinians want is not two states but two stages,” meaning an end to Israel in phases. He also said that by focusing solely on settlement building and not on what the Arab countries should also be doing for peace, Israel felt that it was being driven to its knees and delivered to the other side rather than asked to join a shared effort.

Barak is right to note that the real issue is that of securing the final peace. And it is not at all unreasonable for him to spell out what Israel’s expectations of such a peace would be, just as it is not unreasonable for the Palestinians to spell out what their expectations are, as well.
But Barak is wrong to imply that getting an immediate freeze on settlement building is somehow unrelated to the quest for a final peace between the two sides. At its root, after all, the big issue between Israelis and Palestinians is a dispute over real estate: who gets what.
International law stipulates that being an occupying power– as Israel is in the West Bank and in Syria’s Golan, or as the US has been for the past six years in Iraq– confers no rights at all to sovereignty over the territory occupied.
(Just this week, the US is taking the first big step toward the complete withdrawal from Iraq that was negotiated with the Iraqi government last November. And the US has never sought to exploit its position as occupying power by moving groups of permanent American “settlers” into Iraq.)
But throughout the 42 years Israel has been the occupying power in the West Bank, it has put those 500,000 Jewish-Israeli settlers in there. And the fact of their presence inside the West Bank already makes a complete Israeli withdrawal from the area thousands of times harder to contemplate than it would have been without them there– just as Ariel Sharon and other highly placed settlement boosters all along intended.
But the idea that the Israeli government would continue boosting the settlers’ numbers (and their consumption of scarce West bank resources like land and water) while the permanent-status negotiations continue defies belief, and should be seen as a major indicator of lack of Israeli good faith in the negotiation.
It is as if, during a property dispute I’d have with my neighbor here in Virginia, in which all the law indicates my ownership of the property in question, she blithely continued to build a new condo complex on the property. In agreeing to take on my suit against my neighbor, one of the first things a judge would do would be to issue a “cease and desist” order against her building operations.
In the Israeli-Palestinian dispute it is effectively the US that has for many years now taken on the role of “judge” in the dispute. “Cease and desist” is the very least this judge should require as a token of Israel’s good faith and good intent in the final-status negotiations that must surely soon get underway. (Otherwise, where is the territorial basis for the independent Palestinian state? Where are the provisions of international law that must undergird any agreement among the world’s nations if it is to have any durability or legitimacy?)
There is a good question, however, as to how much political capital President Obama should actually expend on trying to win Israel’s compliance with the “cease and desist” order. And here I think that so far he has played the diplomatic/political game quite effectively.
He and his officials have all remained quite firm on verbally requesting a complete settlement freeze, and on justifying that request in the public arena; but they have as yet undertaken no actual policy actions to hold Israel accountable for following through on that demand. My sense is that they are holding their political “big guns” for a confrontation with Netanyahu’s government that may well lie shortly ahead– over the big issue of the final-status peace.
Meanwhile, by rhetorically holding firm on the settlement-building issue they have been able to educate many key members of the US Congress about the importance of the territorial issues underlying it, and about Netanyahu’s lack of good faith in this negotiating arena. They have also quietly but steadily been building the domestic constituency inside the US for forthright action on securing the final peace.
For the Palestinians and the Arab states, an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank is currently seen as an essential precursor to the resumption of any final-status talks with Israel. This is a cautious position that is solidly rooted in the Palestinians’ 18-year history of negotiating with Israel.
In the Oslo Accord of 1993, which was only an interim agreement between the PLO and Israel, both sides committed to completing their final-status peace agreement before 1999… But that deadline slipped by. From 1996 through 1999 Israel’s prime minister was Benjamin Netanyahu. He almost totally refused to negotiate final-status issues with the Palestinians, agreeing only reluctantly to engage on negotiations on a very few, very small, further “interim” steps. Meanwhile, throughout those post-Oslo years, Israel’s settlement-building program went into high gear.
So by 1999 the Palestinians did not have the promised final-status peace agreement; and meanwhile the territorial base on which they could hope to establish their state had been significantly further eroded.
Then in Annapolis in November 2007, no less a figure (!) than Pres. George W. Bush publicly vowed that his final peacemaking would result in securing the text of a final-status peace agreement before the end of his presidency. It didn’t happen. Indeed, as his presidency entered its final days Israel was pounding the Palestinians in Gaza extremely harshly and the very shaky peace talks that had been underway with Mahmoud Abbas fell completely apart, having gotten almost nowhere.
Oh, and throughout the period of what was once lauded as “the Annapolis process” Israel’s government implanted many additional thousands of settlers into the West Bank. That, in spite of what were supposed to be its commitments under the 2002 Road Map.
Fool me once, shame on you? Fool me twice, shame on me? Fool me three times– what?
That history certainly fuels much of the stress that the Palestinians– all Palestinians– place on the need for a settlement freeze. But they too, all of them, also share Ehud Barak’s view that the biggest imperative right now is not (just) a settlement freeze. And it is not (just) the lifting of a few roadblocks here or there in the West Bank; it is not (just) improving the quantity and mix of freight that Israel allows into Gaza, or Israel’s release of some proportion of the 11,000 Palestinian “security” detainees it currently holds in its prisons…
After all, any or all of those actions if taken by Israel can very easily be reversed so long as Israel is the still the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza. Recall how Likud strategic-affairs thinker Efraim Inbar talked about this in the amazingly candid interview he gave me back in March.
What the Palestinians, like Ehud Barak and also (if his rhetoric is to be believed) Benjamin Netanyahu, seek above all is a final-status peace between these two nations.
Yes, of course the two sides will enter into this negotiation with widely differing opening “requirements” and requests. That is natural. But if the US is to help midwife a final peace between them that is sufficiently fair to everyone concerned that it ends up being durable, then this peace must take international law as a starting point that can help it sift through and give due consideration to the claims and desires of both parties.
Pres. Obama has expressed his commitment to winning a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace since his earliest days in office. Thus far he has not defined a deadline for reaching this goal. (It’s probably wise to be a bit cautious on that, given the debacle of Bush’s ‘Annapolis’ deadline.)
But Obama has been lining his ducks up for a peace push in a very smart way.
So now, if Ehud Barak and prime minister Netanyahu are saying they absolutely cannot bear to be pressured on the settlement-building issue, Obama and his team should politely but firmly usher them into the next diplomatic chamber.
That’s the one where the US, the ‘Quartet’, the Palestinians, and the other Arab parties are all sitting down ready to negotiate the final peace.
And probably, that is also the point at which Washington should start implementing firm accountability measures against Israel for any further violations it enacts of the order to “cease and desist” building settlements. Accountability measures, after all, cannot be implemented against only one party to this negotiation.

Ehud Barak, who in 1999 was briefly the “peace candidate” for PM before he became the peace movement’s executioner in December 2000 and then went on to design and unleash Israel’s most recent assault against Gaza, has been at it again.
Today’s Haaretz tells us that Barak

has authorized the building of 300 new homes in the West Bank, defying U.S. calls for a halt to settlement growth.

What a sad, sad guy.
I guess we got some very early inklings of his fondness for the settlers back in the early days of his (disastrously mishandled) premiership a decade ago, when he went to visit the settlers at Beit El and said something like “I will always stand with you.”
It’s been a notable feature of Israeli politics that military leaders have always had an extremely easy entree into the top ranks of the political system. In 1998-9 Barak was catapulted almost directly from being IDF chief of staff to being head of Labour’s ticket in the 1999 election. Then in the early 2000s, after he lost an internal party election for head of the ticket he left political life completely, to go off and make a ton of– extremely immoral– money selling Israeli military systems around the world. (I think he was also put on the board of a couple of big US defense companies, as well.)
But then, the moment the party ran into trouble because of party leader Amir Peretz’s disastrous performance as ‘defense minister’ during the 2006 war on Lebanon, the party called Barak back once again. And once again he catapulted straight to the top of the party– and into the just-vacated defense minister slot in the government, from which he masterminded the “rehabilitation” of the IDF as a fighting force that could both strike fear into the heart of Israel’s neighbors and allow Israelis to feel “good” about themselves again.
Which was the whole “point” of last December’s war.
(It worked as planned regarding the second of those goals, but failed to achieve the first one.)
And now, here Barak is again, strutting his Napoleonic-style stuff in defiance of the United States on the settlements issue.
So President Obama, what will your response be?

And while so many of us are watching the workings of a powerful theobureaucracy so dramatically exposed in Tehran, let’s not forget this…
Israel’s perennial debate over ‘Who is a Jew’ took another nasty turn this week when a judge on the High Rabbinical Court, Rabbi Avraham Sherman, reportedly said that new immigrants to Israel who want to be accepted as Jews according to Orthdox Jewish religious law, “halakha”, are “in the vast majority gentiles who want to convert out of self-interest.”
Sherman also accused the Orthodox rabbis who want to convert these immigrants of suffering from a “false and distorted perspective, a lack of understanding of halakha.”
This was the lead item in a report by Yair Ettinger in today’s Haaretz.
The question of “Who is a Jew” may seem to outsiders to be one for individuals and their congregations to decide. But that’s not so in Israel, a country founded on the idea that people duly recognized to be “Jewish” have a whole range of privileges not accorded to those who aren’t. For example, any person duly recognized as Jewish has the right to immigrate and gain citizenship, no further questions asked.
Important questions of allocation of resources within the state also hang on whether a person is Jewish or not. For example, the “Israel Land Administration” controls over 90% of the land in Israel, and though the country’s High Court has ruled that non-Jewish citizens should have the same rights of access and usage of these lands as Jewish people, in practice the bodies that administer the lands continue to practice systematic discrimination against people, including Israeli citizens, who are not Jewish. Further details available on the Adalah website, including here.
(Moreover, many of those lands and properties are lands that were owned by Palestinians before 1948, from which they were expelled that year. The state of Israel has prevented those Palestinian refugees– now numbering more than six million– from returning to their families’ properties ever since. See “right to immigrate” above.)
So when discussing the question of “Who is a Jew”, Israel’s state and religious authorities are decidedly not talking “only” about a matter of an individual’s conscience, belief, or religious practice. They are talking about significant questions of access to resources and other benefits accorded by the state.
“Duly recognized as Jewish” is thus obviously, in Israel, an important category. But who has the power to grant this “recognition”? This has been a particularly acute issue regarding the half million or so formerly-Soviet immigrants who poured into Israel in the 1990s whose Jewishness was open at the time to significant question.
Ettinger gives us these additional details about the event at which Rabbi Sherman was speaking. It was the Eternal Jewish Family International (EJFI)’s second Jerusalem Conference on Universal Conversion Standards in Intermarriage, that ended Wednesday in Jerusalem:

Most of the participants were ultra-Orthodox communal rabbis from around the world, many of whom work in outreach programs.
For three days [at the conference] the state’s conversion programs were attacked by rabbis, including civil servants here – religious court judges (dayanim) and chief municipal rabbis – and by the visiting participants.
Sherman spoke at the conference at length on the ultra-Orthodox view on hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are not considered Jewish according to halakha. He believes they should not be converted, and certainly not in the special conversion courts set up under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s Office, headed by Rabbi Haim Druckman.
“There is no logic to telling tens of thousands of goyim [non-Jews] who grew up on heresy, hate of religion, liberalism, communism, socialism, that suddenly they can undergo a revolution deep in their souls. There is no such reality,” said Sherman. His ruling, he said, was based on the writings of the greatest of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv. “A large percentage [of the converts] did not intend on accepting the mitzvot when they accepted conversion,” he said in his address to the conference.
Rabbi Yosef Sheinin, the chief rabbi of Ashdod, told the conference on Tuesday about immigrants from the former Soviet Union: “When they want to marry, they will do everything possibly to deceive. They are to be assumed to be cheaters.”
The conference also dealt with fighting Jewish assimilation, but the crisis sparked by Sherman’s annulling the conversions of Rabbi Druckman’s conversion courts took a central role. Druckman is a leading religious-Zionist rabbi.

So it seems there are still a lot of sharp differences between Sherman and the hierarchy he represents, on one side, and the “special conversion courts” set up by the PM’s office, on the other. Even Israel’s High Court has been brought in to try to rule on the dispute.
So long as Israelis want their country to be centrally defined by its status as “a Jewish state”, such disputes seem likely to continue.
My views are that theocracy (and the theobureaucracy that accompanies it) are everywhere enemies of the free exercise of conscience, and that theobureaucratic considerations should never, in any state, be allowed to undermine the important principle of the equality of all citizens under the law.
Israel’s citizens– all of them, including that large minority who are ethnic Palestinians or who for other reasons are not “duly recognized as Jewish”– need to sort out this question among themselves at some point. And preferably in a forum that is quite free of the intervention of powerful theobureaucracies that may not even in any significant sense be considered Israeli.
As a US citizen, I must say I’m still not sure why my tax dollars should go to support a state that practices such a deeply engrained form of theobureaucratically enforced discrimination.

As widely predicted, in his speech at Bar-Ilan University this evening, Bibi Netanyahu cautiously abandoned one of the many outer defenses he had thrown out around his core project to preserve the ability of Jewish Israelis to settle in and control all of Jerusalem and as much of the West Bank as possible.
That’s my reading of the speech, in which for the first time he gave very guarded support to the proposal to establish a Palestinian state.
A completely demilitarized Palestinian state, that is, and moreover one in which Israel’s control over all of Jerusalem will apparently be undiluted.
These excerpts from the reuters web-page above:

The territory in Palestinian hands must be demilitarised — in other words, without an army, without control of airspace, and with effective security safeguards …
A fundamental condition for ending the conflict is a public, binding, and honest Palestinian recognition of the state of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.
…Israel needs defensible borders and Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, will remain united.

I believe it is excellent that this man has now expressed his support for a Palestinian state. So there is now a goal for the immediate next round of robust peacemaking to focus on.
Haaretz has a page of live-blogging of the speech, in English. It’s a little confusing since (as with most live-blogging) you have to read it from the bottom.
At 20:15 the blogger, Benjamin Hartman, notes this: “Three mentions of Iran in first two minutes.”
At 20:19: “He calls for an immediate start to peace talks (uncomfortable shifting in seats heard) with no preconditions.”
The audience, remember, is a toughly religio-nationalistic one. Bar Ilan is a university for religiously observant Jewish Israelis and was the alma mater of Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin.
(Which reminds me of a comment I heard from a pro-peace American-Jewish friend the other day. He said, “It’s actually good that Obama didn’t go to make a speech at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It could have been really dangerous for him… Don’t forget, 30% of Israelis now routinely say that Amir should be pardoned.”)
Oh, I just saw the BBC’s collection of text excerpts from the speech. It is a slightly different collection. (Why hasn’t Israel’s allegedly tech-savvy government made the whole text available in English already?)
The BBC text has these important provisions:

The Palestinian territory will be without arms, will not control airspace, will not be able to have arms.
I call on you, our Palestinian neighbours, and to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority – Let us begin peace negotiations immediately, without preconditions. Israel is committed to international agreements and expects all the other parties to fulfil their obligations as well.
We have no intention of building new settlements or of expropriating land for new settlements. But there is a need to allow settlers to lead normal lives, to allow mothers and fathers to raise their children like all families around the world. [The ‘natural growth’ canard there.]
The refugee problem must be solved outside of Israeli borders. Their return goes against the principle of Israel as a Jewish state. I believe that with goodwill, and international investment, this humanitarian problem can be solved once and for all.

This is, of course, only this Israeli leader’s opening position in what I hope will be a speedy and successful negotiation. It is one that keeps his hard-line coalition intact and pays a nod to Washington on the two-state question, while Bibi is continuing to dig his heels in hard on the settlement issue.
By the way, on settlements, Dan Kurtzer, who was the US ambassador to Israel 2001-2005, gave the definitive version of what was agreed and what was not agreed between Israel and the Bush administration on settlement building, in this piece in the WaPo today.
Bottom line there: in the absence of a Palestinian-Israeli agreement on the matter and in the absence of Israel providing firm and fixed demarcations for either the outer or the “built-up” areas of the settlements, there was no agreement with Washington on where additional settlement construction might be “okay”.
That, in response to Krauthammer’s claims there was an agreement.
But back to Bibi. His concession on a Palestinian “state” is still extremely paltry. Worth giving a small welcome to, I suppose. But let us never forget that Bophuthatswana and its like were also, back in the day, described by Pretoria (and significantly also by Israel), as “states.”
The term means nothing unless the state has real powers to determine its own policies. Some constraints on the level of militarization of a Palestinian state have always been on the table–though there should be some element of reciprocity involved, and with Israeli drones still hovering low over Gaze 24/7 the idea the Palestinians should have no control over their own airspace would be a hard one to sell.
So now we’ve gotten Bibi to say the S-word, Obama should push as fast as possible to secure a final-status peace in which the issues of Jerusalem, final borders, and refugees are all finally resolved. This S-word– like S-for-settlements S-word– is only a very preliminary step on the way.

Haaretz’s Bradley Burston reported this yesterday:

On the Sabbath, Israeli television viewers were treated to the recorded-on-a-weekday observations of Arele, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Karnei Shomron, grinning as he watched the progress of an arson fire burning Palestinian land near the Gilad Farm, an icon of the outlaw outpost movement.
Asked by Israel Channel Two Television reporter Shai Gal what would happen if Israeli forces tried to evacuate Havat Gilad, Arele replied, “At most, they’ll demolish one measly shack, so they’ll have something to show – that Kushon [a Hebrew slur equivalent to the “N” word] in the United States, in order to have an Etnan [the biblical term for a fee paid to a prostitute] to give him – if you [secular] guys know what an Etnan is.”
According to Arele, the fire, in this instance a form of pre-emptive revenge, was the price tag Palestinians would be forced to pay each time Obama pressed Israel to “touch any settlement of any kind, any place in Judea and Samaria.”

This last point is very important.
Gabi Peterberg has warned that, as in the case of the final portion of many decolonization processes, as decolonization in the West Bank become a more imminent reality those settlers who fear losing their situation of uber-privilege and even perhaps their quite illegally acquired homes may well go on final rampages of unbridled violence against the unarmed indigenes.
(And don’t you love the term “pre-emptive revenge”?)
The UN-OCHA weekly report for 27 May – 2 June reported (PDF) that,

Settler violence and attacks increased this week in the northern West Bank, notably in the Nablus and Qalqiliya districts in response to a recent Israeli government announcement of its intention to dismantle 26 settlement outposts.

The Palestinians of the West Bank urgently need protection from this violence.
Can the very numerous Palestinian “security forces” who have been trained and armed by the US do anything to provide it– or are they too busy trying to suppress internal political opposition to Ramallastan in an attempt to help Abu Mazen “protect” the settlers?
The rest of Burston’s report makes important reading, too. In it, he writes of “racism… masquerading as love of Israel.”