Netanyahu’s potential successor links Palestinian ‘autonomy’ to Jordan

Former Israeli minister Gideon Sa’ar, widely tipped as a potential successor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as leader of the Likud party, reaffirmed his rejection of a two-state solution on Wednesday, suggesting Palestinians in the West Bank could have Jordanian citizenship.

Sa’ar made the remarks at an event in Jerusalem organised by the “Israel Victory Project”, an initiative of hard-right US-based think-tank the Middle East Forum.

“The two-state solution was nothing more than a two-state slogan, and it was only theoretical,” Sa’ar told the audience, according to a report by Jewish News Syndicate.

The report added that the former Likud minister “call[ed] for strengthening the Jewish majority in Jerusalem with projected housing projects in Jewish neighbourhoods and throughout the country with a new national push for Jewish immigration from Diaspora Jewish communities.”

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“He also suggest[ed] that Palestinians living in the West Bank could once again receive national citizenship in Jordan,” the report continued.

An item in the Jerusalem Post quoted Sa’ar as telling the gathering: “The only way to a possible solution in the future is to find a way to tie the Palestinian autonomy in Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank] with the Kingdom of Jordan.”

“The ‘victory paradigm’, like Jabotinsky’s ‘Iron Wall’ concept, assumes that an agreement may be possible in the future, but only after a clear and decisive Israeli victory,” Sa’ar continued. “The transition to the ‘victory paradigm’ is contingent upon abandoning the Oslo concept of two states between the sea and the Jordan River.”