I think everybody should calm down. The facts on the ground are that the majority of Israelis reconciled with idea of a future Palestinian state. Road Map was approved by Knesset. But the devil is in the details. The current government said already that it holds itself obligated to follow on what previous government and Knesset signed. But! It insists on Palestinians completing their part of the bargain: stop the violence and advocacy of violence, disarm terrorists, etc, etc. When and if the Palestinians actually do that, then why not? But no state until then.
Its hard to find a more sensible position.
Of course, IF Pope said that he wants Palestinian state tomorrow regardless of anything else (did he say that?) then I strongly disagree.
Yup, the only real issues are timing and sovereignty, a concept introduced by GWB. Worth noting that Knesset approved the Road Map with reservations that, like Oslo, requires compliance for progress to take place, and that the state be demilitarized. Other than what he said, I don't know what people expected the Pope to say.
Someday a two-state solution may become possible, but it is naive in the extreme to believe that this can occur while the centerpiece of the radical Islamic and Palestinian agendas is maximizing Jewish deaths. A durable compromise will be achievable only when we no longer, to borrow from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "define deviancy down" for the Palestinians.
Today we cannot envision the 250,000 Jewish settlers who live outside Israel's pre-1967 borders being permitted to live at all, much less live free and unmolested, in a West-Bank-Gaza Palestinian state. But some 1.2 million Arabs, almost all Muslim, today live in Israel in peace among some five million Jews--about double the percentage of Jews now in the West Bank as a share of the Muslim population there. Israel's Arab citizens worship freely--one hears muezzins calling the faithful to prayer as one walks around Tel Aviv. They vote in free elections for their own representatives in a real legislature, the Knesset. They give every evidence that they prefer being Arab Israelis to living in the chaos and uncertainty of a West Bank after Israeli withdrawal.
A two-state solution can become a reality when the Palestinians are held to the same standards as Israelis--to the requirement that Jewish settlers in a West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state would be treated with the same decency that Israel treats its Arab citizens. Until then, three failures in 13 years should permit us to evaluate the wisdom of further concessions.
PM Netanyahu has not endorsed a separate “State.”