Bennett Repeats Call for Netanyahu to Abandon Two-State Vision

Education Minister Naftali Bennett called Sunday on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to rescind his support for a Palestinian state in response to Friday’s Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria.

Speaking to reporters in the Western Wall plaza, Bennett said that Jerusalem has been the capital of the Jewish people for 3,00 years, and said the UN resolution represents both danger and opportunity for Israel.

“No resolution can change the fact that this land, Jerusalem, is our capital. And no people can be a conqueror in their own land. That’s why this resolution, like many of the earlier resolutions, will be thrown into the dustbin of history,” Bennett said.

The minister, who also heads the Jewish Home Knesset faction, added that thousands of terrorists around the world celebrated the resolution, from Berlin to Paris to New York, all the way to the Palestinian Authority, and noted Palestinian celebrations in reaction to the September 11, 2001 attack on New York and Washington. All together, he said that Friday’s resolution is an opportunity for Israel to re-think and re-draft its policies of the past 25 years.

“The approach where we adopted the Oslo accords, the approach were we gave up territory in Gaza, the approach where we declared the need for a Palestinian state [must end]. We thought this approach would gain us sympathy from the world, but instead we got tens of thousands of missiles from Gaza, thousands of Israelis murdered on the streets and one condemnation after another.

It’s time to decide between two alternatives: surrendering our land, or sovereignty. We’ve tried surrendering our land, it didn’t work; it is time for sovereignty. In the near future we will take steps to apply Israeli law to Ma’ale Adumim and the rest of Judea and Samaria. It’s time for Israel to decide,”Bennett said.