Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come up with a new, supposedly sophisticated answer for pesky journalists who ask whether he still supports the two-state solution. If Netanyahu responded that he hopes for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, he would incur the wrath of his friends in the government, the Likud and the Knesset. On the other hand, if he said the two-state solution is dead in the water, he would face condemnation by the entire international community. He cannot, however, simply ignore the question. So what can he do? Throw out the response, “Rather than deal with labels, I want to deal with substance.”

Netanyahu tested this evasion tactic Feb. 15 at a joint White House news conference with President Donald Trump. A week later he recycled it while standing alongside his Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull, at a news conference in Sydney.

At both conferences, Netanyahu listed two issues of substance, as he called them, that are more important in his view than labels. The first is Palestinian recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. In other words, that is the label the state of Palestine is required to attach to the State of Israel. If that’s a matter of substance, then Israel has a big problem with the peace treaties it signed with Egypt and Jordan. As everyone knows, there is no mention of Israel’s Jewish identity in those documents. The second issue is the demand that Israeli security forces retain control of the independent neighboring state. This is, indeed, a matter of substance, but it is not feasible. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has made it quite clear that he would be willing to accept the deployment of an international force in an independent Palestinian state, but would under no circumstances allow an Israeli soldier to set foot on the land of Palestine.

The two-state solution is losing all relevance in terms of public awareness and substance in Israel. The right wing is doing all it possibly can to obliterate it from the public and media discourse or to besmirch labels referring to a diplomatic resolution to the conflict with the Palestinians: Evacuation of settlements is, in right-wing parlance, the “uprooting of settlers”; the West Bank is referred to by the biblical Judea and Samaria; “terror state” is substituted for “Palestinian state”; and human rights and peace organizations are the “radical left.” There are several noteworthy recent actions pointing to the two-state solution's loss of relevance.