Health Minister and Meretz party head Nitzan Horowitz and his friends have no problem excluding the birthplaces of the Jewish people like Hebron, Shiloh, Anatot, and Beit El from the Jewish faith. Nor does his party have any problem removing Zionism itself from its campaign platform. They have done this in the past. Horowitz himself even expressed public support for the International Criminal Court's decision to investigate Israeli "war crimes" in the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria, and east Jerusalem.
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Now comes his bizarre meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a leader whose time has passed and a man barely anyone continues to take seriously; a Holocaust denier who is suing IDF soldiers at The Hague and pays murderous terrorists and their families stipends, a chairman that no longer has the support of his people and who, on the evening of his meeting with Horowitz, called the parents of two terrorists who were recently taken out by Israeli security forces. This introduction, which Abbas chose ahead of his meeting with Horowitz, is not particularly surprising given the boastful remarks of some of his senior officials regarding the six terrorists who escaped Gilboa Prison, four of whom are serving life sentences.
Nevertheless, the meeting Horowitz initiated, along with Defense Minister Benny Gantz's dialogue with the PA leader, make two points clear: The first is that Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is right-wing on paper only. With just six Knesset seats to his name, he has no real ability to realize his right-wing beliefs. He is being held hostage to a government dependent on Meretz, Ra'am's Muslim Brotherhood party, and Labor. Not even the most combative and hawkish comments from senior Yamina party officials such as Ayelet Shaked can conceal this political fact.
Secondly, Abbas' meetings with Gantz and Horowitz could have consequences for Bennett. They signal to the US, which is trying to push Bennett toward a diplomatic process with the Palestinians and Ramallah, that it is possible to act with Bennett's contrarian partners and behind his back. They teach the US that if Bennett allows his contrarian partners to conduct themselves in this manner, he is not truly capable of opposing similar, and even far-reaching, moves the US seeks to initiate in the Palestinian arena.
The Palestinians can also sense Bennett's weakness. It was against this background that Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh warned Israel that "if the two-state solution disintegrates, we will return to the starting point of 1948," that "there will be one leadership for the Palestinian people from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea," and that "Israel will even die from a demographic perspective" in an interview with Qatari daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi.
Following his meeting with Abbas, Horowitz noted Meretz has a mission within the government: "to keep the two-station alive, not to let it disappear." But in the political reality Bennett has thrown himself into, he isn't exactly capable of doing anything about it anyway.
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