Tomorrow Benjamin Netanyahu will be sworn in as prime minister of the State of Israel. In recent coalition talks, he made significant concessions to convince the Labor (left-wing) party to join his government. It is interesting in this light to see an interview with him when he was 28 years old. From ICEJ News:
An episode of the local Boston PBS show "The Advocate" featuring a 28-year old Benjamin Netanyahu debating the dangers of a Palestinian state has begun circulating on the Web recently. In the 10-minute clip, Israel’s prime minister-designate is introduced as recent MIT graduate "Benjamin Nitay” and is called upon to testify as a "witness" in a mock court case over whether the US should support Palestinian statehood. Asked whether the issue of Palestinian self-determination is at the heart of the Middle East conflict, Netanyahu replied: "The real core of the conflict is the unfortunate Arab refusal to accept the State of Israel… For 20 years the Arabs had both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and if self-determination, as they now say, is the core of the conflict, they could have easily established a Palestinian state, but they didn’t… What we’re talking about here is not the attempt to build the state but to destroy one." Israel’s future prime minister went on to argue that the US should oppose a two state solution because there "already exists a Palestinian state" in Jordan. Netanyahu went on to cite article one of the Palestinian National Covenant that declares "the people of Palestine are part of the Arab nation… The Arab nation has 21 states… there is no right to form another that will threaten my existence." A Netanyahu staff member said that they were forwarded the clip dozens of times and that Netanyahu himself saw it. "I felt kind of embarrassed to see how young I looked," he said.
Netanyahu apparently went by the last name of “Nitay” while living in the U.S. in the 1970s.)
