My Meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu Fourteen Years Ago--A Sobering Look Into His Uncompromising Mind

 

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  I recently returned to notes I made about my first and only trip to Israel in 2009. As part of the trip, we had a private session with Netanyahu. It was a chilling meeting. Netanyahu displayed not an iota of appreciation for the Palestinian predicament. Fourteen years later, the tragedy continues. While condemning without qualification Hamas' horrific murder of over a thousand Israelis and capturing hundreds of innocent hostages, Netanyahu has continued now for decades to work thwart a two-state or other solution that would respect the rights of Palestinians. Doing so, he has thwarted peace and incited violence and death to this very day.

  
  

  
  

  Israel was the last stop on my trip to the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel) in October, 2009.  I wrote about it in my journal at the time,  “How sad that these religions (Jewish, Christian and Muslim), all committed to one God, all beholden to the same basic values—whether those expressed by Jesus in the Beatitudes and Sermon on the Mount, or the Jews in the six points of its star, or the precepts of the Koran, have spent so much blood and lives in fighting against one another.  What horrible evidence of man’s propensity to defile the ‘other’ in order to justify one’s self worth.  And it continues today,” I wrote in 2009 and as I write now in 2023. 

  
  

   

  On October 15, thanks to Eason Jordan, who had been leading CNN International News, we had a private meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu.  I wrote this after the meeting:  “This was more than a little interesting because, at this moment, there is a huge debate about the so-called Gladstone Report which accuses Israeli soldiers of human rights violations in the attack on the Gaza Strip a year ago.  Also, fierce debate about his policy urging the expansion of more Jewish settlements in the Palestinian-held West Bank, an action that makes peace talk discussions a non-starter.” 

  
  

  And so in 2023, it continues.

   

  I asked Netanyahu about this being a roadblock to negotiations.  He responded immediately (almost angrily) saying he did not feel they were the real issue—that he said was the Palestinians’ unwillingness to agree to a sovereign Jewish nation on agreed borders.  He went on to make the case that the land had really belonged to both religions over time (conveniently ignoring the reality that this area had been consigned to the Palestinians by the United Nations). He asserted that the Jewish settlements occupied only about 3% of the land area, conveniently side-stepping the fact that these are choice areas and non-contiguous sections of the West Bank, making a unified Palestinian state virtually “impossible.”

   

  The steely, unyielding character of Netanyahu was revealed to me in striking and stunning fashion in this meeting.  Little idea did I have at the time of the human trauma and death it was causing and would be causing today as I write this in December 2023.