Israeli Press
Haaretz writer says Israel's opposition leaders dodge the occupation question
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Every Israeli politician hoping to replace Benjamin Netanyahu is running from the one issue the world keeps putting on Israel's table, the intelligence scholar Uri Bar-Joseph argued in the liberal daily Haaretz on Sunday: the occupation.
His evidence is a national security conference Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth held two weeks ago with the INSS think tank, where party leaders answered how Israel should live in the region.
Gadi Eisenkot answered with force-building and deterrence, in Bar-Joseph's summary. Naftali Bennett offered Saudi normalisation without a Palestinian state. Benny Gantz spoke of security and democratic values, Avigdor Liberman of alliances, and Yair Golan of separation from the Palestinians — without saying the word occupation.
Only two speakers broke the pattern, Bar-Joseph notes: Mansour Abbas, who described dialogue toward mutual recognition of the two peoples, and Youssef Jabareen of the Joint List, the sole leader to name the Arab Peace Initiative as the way out. On the right, Itamar Ben Gvir proposed "encouraging" Palestinians to emigrate from Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and Yitzhak Goldknopf full annexation.
The world, Bar-Joseph writes, is not asking about Haredi conscription. The Gaza Peace Council's plan, the French-Saudi update of the Arab initiative from July 2025 and the American Democrats' "23-state solution" all trade Israeli security for an end to occupation — and Rahm Emanuel has warned publicly that refusing means losing the American strategic alliance.
Leaders who dodge that choice, he concludes, have not yet shown they deserve to lead.
