Yoseph Haddad has issued a second, sharper response to the old interview in which he backed a Palestinian state, saying he does not have "a drop of trust in the Palestinians" today and firmly opposes a state he called an existential disaster for Israel.
Haddad, the Arab Israeli advocate who is number two on Ofer Winter's Amcha Yisrael list, has been under fire since Saturday night, when journalist Mohammad Magadli published a clip from an Arabic interview Haddad gave to the Saudi channel Al Arabiya. In it he says the final solution is the State of Israel alongside a State of Palestine.
In his new statement, Haddad said the clip is more than five and a half years old and did not resurface by chance. He said it comes from a long interview given around the time of President Trump's "Deal of the Century," a plan he noted had the enthusiastic support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.
At the time, he said, he believed the conflict would end once proud Arab Israelis moved into key positions and sat at the negotiating table, where they could make sure that what he called Palestinian nonsense would not fool Israel.
That changed, he said, during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021, when he watched Palestinians together with nationalist and extremist Arab Israelis set Israel's streets on fire. He said he understood then that there would be no peace with them and that they must not be given a state. The October 7 massacre, he added, should have woken up anyone who had not yet woken up.
Haddad said the Palestinians in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria hate him, that many want him dead, and that they label him a collaborator and a traitor. His record, he said, shows who he is, "not a timed and edited campaign."
He tied his position to his political home, saying he joined Amcha Yisrael because the party has made voluntary emigration from Gaza its goal, which he called the only solution there. The party's principles state that no Palestinian state will be established in the Land of Israel.
He closed with a promise for after the election: as public diplomacy minister, he said, he would expose "the Palestinian lie" to the world and kill the idea of a Palestinian state for good.
The clip has drawn fire from the right, where writer Hillel Gershuni called it a death blow to Winter's party.
