The former chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Yuval Steinitz, has said that, “For any foreseeable future I do not see a partner, or any possibility to leave Judea and Samaria or even part of it … The idea of a two-state solution should be dead, today, because unfortunately a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would bring about Israel’s demise … [Such a Palestinian state would] immediately become an outpost for Iran.”

Steinitz said that the only reason Qassem rockets had not been fired at the center of the country or at Ben-Gurion International Airport was because Israel had a military presence in the West Bank. He said that, “We underestimated the pressure coming from the outside Arab world against real peace and real compromise between Israel and the Palestinians.” He added that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas talks nicely of peace but he supports terrorism,  and that when Abbas hugged Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar this summer, who killed three people in Nahariya, including a four-year-old girl, he showed that he was no different than former PA leader Yasser Arafat.

Steinitz was once an enthusiastic member of Peace Now who demonstrated many times for a concessionary policy and who welcomed the original Oslo Accords in 1993. “I felt that what we did was a terrible mistake … I realized that, to my frustration, we were giving up land for war and terror and incitement.” As the Palestinians continued with their anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric, he worried that “instead of a demilitarized Palestinian state we might end up with a militarized Palestinian state in the center of the country.” By 1995, he began to lobby against the Oslo Accords and in 1999 he left the academic world and successfully ran for Knesset as a member of the Likud Party, which he has represented in the Knesset ever since (Tovah Lazaroff, ‘Two-state solution should be dead,’ Jerusalem Post, September 14, 2008).