Netanyahu Called It a "Deterrent Buffer Zone" on Monday. Tuesday His Finance Minister Demanded Permanent Sovereignty Over It — in Gaza and in Lebanon.

The headline everywhere was "voluntary migration... is not racism." That was the fourth-most important thing he said. Smotrich opened the first NatCon Jerusalem on Tuesday morning — Binyanei HaUma, Edmund Burke Foundation, Yoram Hazony chairing, three weeks before the October 27 election — in a session the published program titles "Israel–U.S. Relations: A Strategic Maturing." He asked for permanent sovereignty over held territory in Gaza and in Lebanon, sovereignty or civil law in Judea and Samaria, a state-organized emigration channel out of Gaza, the formal position that Palestinian nationhood is "a fiction," and a shift with Washington "from a relationship of dependence to a partnership between two independent nations." Four misses. The Prime Minister described that same ground as "deterrent buffer zones" at a state memorial the day before — impermanent by definition — and nobody asked his office which it is. Lebanon vanished from every write-up; permanent sovereignty over part of a neighboring state is not the Gaza argument with a second place name attached. The American passage came eight days after Smotrich and Strock told Netanyahu in writing that a U.S. plan had to be rejected because it broke "the understandings that were reached between you and the US administration" — entry #62 — which is the same minister claiming independence from Washington and leverage over Washington in the same fortnight. And this was not a rally slip. It was a scheduled keynote with a printed title at an international conference, said in English, on the record, by a sitting Finance Minister running for reelection. Nobody buried it. It just wasn't read.