Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a rousing performance about the importance of US-Israel relations in his speech to the US Congress and managed to compliment both current US President Joe Biden and former US President Donald Trump, but missed an opportunity to move forward any major policy goal of Israel given how vague he remained.
Regarding achieving a hostage deal in Gaza, he did not prepare Israelis for some of the hard concessions the country may need to make to seal the deal. Strangely, he said that negotiations were happening at the moment he was speaking, only shortly after his office delayed Mossad Director David Barnea from returning to the bargaining table.
Netanyahu also did not break any new ground on the Day After in Gaza, officially recommending that the UAE and Egypt, along with some version of the Palestinian Authority, replace Hamas.
Rather, he maintained the vague phrase of Palestinians who are not seeking Israel’s destruction, avoiding endorsing the PA, though virtually all Israeli defense officials say that the PA is the only group with the power to even potentially replace Hamas.
In fact, the most concrete statement he made, Israel demanding to have overarching security in Gaza for the indefinite future, depending on how it is interpreted, could potentially turn off all other countries from helping take Gaza off Israel’s hands and push Jerusalem into needing to pay for all of Gazans civil needs for an indefinite period.
Netanyahu asked for US support against Hezbollah but did not propose what he might accept short of a permanent promise from Hezbollah to stay out of southern Lebanon in order to avoid a much larger war with the Lebanese terror group.
For a leader known for being a visionary in seeing the severity of the danger of Iran’s nuclear program long before many others did globally, he made no suggestions about actions in the near future to slow Iran’s constant march toward not just one nuclear weapon, but a potential nuclear arsenal.
Abraham Alliance
And while he called for a noble-sounding Abraham Alliance, presumably including the Saudis, he ignored even any hint of concessions toward the Palestinians or any reference to a long-term path to a two-state solution, which would be the minimum that Riyadh would accept for undertaking a historic normalization.
Of course, it is possible that Netanyahu is waiting to make concessions to do a hostage deal, bring a ceasefire with Hezbollah, and refocus on achieving normalization with the Saudis until after he meets with Biden and Trump and returns to Israel.
It is also possible that the Mossad is planning operations to slow Tehran’s path to a nuclear arsenal.
But we heard nothing that gave us much of an idea of where Netanyahu is going in the coming days or weeks during this historic speech.
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