Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-anticipated policy speech on Sunday was lavishly covered by the Israeli press, though pundits sounded reservations about the significance of the prime minister’s chief concession to the Palestinians.

“We would agree to a demilitarised Palestinian state,” the choicest quote from Netanyahu’s half-hour address, served as the banner headline for Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Its rival daily Maariv was more coy: “A Palestinians state - BUT”.

Writ big, Netanyahu’s declaration merely brought him into line with the peacemaking policies of several of his predecessors. But being so heavily girdled in preconditions, and overlayed by Zionist historicity, it drew near-instant rejection from the Palestinians.

The sense of fresh deadlock was noted by Israeli commentators. Akiva Eldar of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper said the speech was “not how one brings down a wall of enmity between two nations”.

Maariv’s Ben Caspit accused Netanyahu – who long refused to countenance a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and who is still balking at international demands to halt Jewish settlement construction despite Washington’s displeasure — of being terminally behind the times.

Few doubted that Netanyahu’s remarks were mainly intended for U.S. President Barack Obama, who has made Palestinian statehood a centrepiece of his Middle East policy. 

But there was also praise for the sweep of the speech, which was broadcast live on primetime Israeli media, and whose content had been kept strictly under wraps.

“Netanyahu wrote an address that brought together everything that is considered a consensus in Jewish public opinion in Israel: the blood-soaked narrative of the history of the Jewish people and settlement in the Land of Israel, the feeling of victimisation and the aspiration for peace (the word ‘peace’ was uttered in the speech more often than any other word), national unity, the emphasis on the state’s Jewish character and the primacy of security considerations,” wrote Yedioth’s Nahum Barnea. 

“Even two contradictory values — a Palestinian state and the settlers — were brought into the consensus. All were his children.”

The family trope also occurred to Haaretz’s Ari Shavit, though what he saw was the prime minister as the newly self-asserting son of Benzion Netanyahu, a noted Zionist scholar with hardline views on Jewish statesmanship and destiny:

“Benjamin Netanyahu crossed the Rubicon yesterday. In order to serve the country, he abandoned his father’s ideological home.”