From the Liveblog of
Saturday, May 4, 2024
Blinken says Netanyahu’s handling of war reflects views of ‘a large majority of Israelis’
As the US pushes to broker a hostages-for-truce deal between Israel and Hamas, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is asked about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic political standing.
“This is a complicated government. It’s a balancing act when you have a coalition. And if you’re just looking at the politics of it, that’s something that he has to factor in,” he says at an event in Arizona.
Blinken adds that whatever one thinks of Netanyahu or the current government, “what’s important to understand is that much of what he’s doing is not simply a reflection of his politics or his policies; it’s actually a reflection of where a large majority of Israelis are in this moment.”
“And I think it’s important to understand that if we’re really going to be able to meet this challenge.”
Asked why Israel’s PR has been so awful, Blinken points to the changed media environment.
“We are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond. And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates,” he says.
He then suggests that while the Palestinians were previously the obstacle to a peace deal, Israel has become uninterested in one.
“To oversimplify, after the creation of the State of Israel, you had decades of basically Arab rejection. That went away with Egypt and Jordan making peace, and others following. Then you had some decades, in effect, of Palestinian rejection, because deals were put on the table — Camp David, Ehud Olmert, others — that would have given Palestinians 95, 96, 97 percent of what they sought, but they were not able to get to yes,” Blinken says.
“But I think the last decade or so has been one in which maybe Israelis became comfortable with that status quo. And as I say, I just don’t think it’s sustainable.”
