Netanyahu: If I Win, No Palestinian State

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it plain today on the eve of a snap election in Israel: If he wins, there will be no Palestinian state, the New York Times reports. "I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands, is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel," he says in an interview with the NRG website. "Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand." He was asked to clarify whether that meant no Palestinian state will be forged if he wins re-election, and he replied, "Correct."

AFP depicts his comments as "a last-ditch effort to woo rightwing voters" while Netanyahu's Likud party trails the center-left Zionist Union in polling; voting in the Israeli election starts tomorrow morning at 5am GST. Netanyahu's stance on Palestine reverses his support for the two-state solution expressed in a 2009 speech, which Haaretz reprints here. Netanyahu said earlier this month that his 2009 position is no longer workable because of unrest in the Middle East, Bloomberg reports. (More Benjamin Netanyahu stories.)