JERUSALEM AND NEW YORK — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bowed to U.S. pressure Sunday and accepted the goal of a Palestinian state. But it was unclear whether the breakthrough, welcomed by President Obama, would lead to a revival of peace talks with the Palestinians, who immediately rejected the sharp limits Netanyahu would place on their nation's sovereignty.
Netanyahu said Israel needed international guarantees that a Palestinian state would not have its own military. In his first policy speech on the conflict since taking office 10 weeks ago, he also insisted that the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority give up claims to Jerusalem as a future capital, recognize Israel as a Jewish state and "impose law and order" on the Hamas militants who run the Gaza Strip.
Although those demands were not explicitly held out by Netanyahu as conditions for resuming American-brokered peace negotiations, Palestinian leaders interpreted them as such and rejected his call to start talks immediately. But the White House said Obama hailed the speech as an "important step forward" and would continue working to bring the two sides together.
Netanyahu's half-hour address, televised in Israel during prime time, staked out a strikingly different approach to the conflict than the one Obama offered 10 days earlier in an address to the Muslim world from Cairo. He again rebuffed Obama's call for a halt to the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank as a first step toward engaging Arab states in a broad regional peace effort.
Speaking two days after Iran's government proclaimed the reelection of its hard-line leader, Netanyahu said the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran was "the greatest danger confronting Israel" and the region. And he said the "fundamental condition" for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not stopping Jewish settlements but securing "a public, binding and honest Palestinian recognition of the state of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people."
But it was his turnabout on Palestinian statehood, qualified though it was, that marked a watershed. The staunchly conservative leader had spent more than two decades in public life rejecting a "two-state solution" as other Israeli governments and successive U.S. administrations embraced that goal. Sunday was the first time he brought himself to utter the word "state" in public to define the homeland Palestinians would get in a peace accord.
