“It moves Israel toward a one-state reality”.
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There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the assault by two Palestinian gunmen on Wednesday in a trendy restaurant complex near Israel’s defence ministry, but Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups were quick to praise it. They repeatedly rejected Netanyahu’s appeal to come to the negotiating table without any preconditions. Most of Area C has been allocated for the benefit of Israeli settlements, which receive preferential treatment at the expense of Palestinian communities, including with regard to access to land and resources, planning, construction, development of infrastructure, and law enforcement.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald flagged a questionable editorial decision that The New York Times made in an article published on May 25, 2016, titled “A Split Over Israel Threatens the Democrats’ Hopes for Unity”.
Strangely enough, the prime minister doesn’t seem to be at all concerned by this. One by An-Najah National University shows 42 percent of Palestinians supporting confederation with Jordan; and the second poll by the online newspaper Al-Hadath shows 76 percent of Palestinians in favor of such a confederation.
Nothing we haven’t heard before. The United States views the settlement as illegitimate and obstacles to peace.
Since Netanyahu never gives the Israeli public a “State of the Nation” address, nobody really knows.
Bob Silverman, a Jew who spent most of his diplomatic career in Muslim-majority nations, is reaching out to Muslims in his own country. It may be true in his daily politicking, but he is a son of a historian and a man with a sense of history himself, and I doubt that he wishes to go down in history as the leader who brought Israel a calamity.
Digging in the archives, I bumped into a press conference Netanyahu – then-deputy foreign minister – gave on December 10, 1991, in Washington.
The Times of Israel did not reveal Ariel’s thinking on the method of transfer of Palestinians from Area C. “Ariel did not specify how those Palestinians would be removed, or where they would be relocated”, the media outlet reported. He added that worldwide summits “only distance peace” by allowing the Palestinians to sit back and let the global community do the work for them.
Following five hours of discussion, foreign ministers from more than two dozen countries issued a bland statement asking the Israelis and Palestinians – neither of whom were invited to attend – to demonstrate “a genuine commitment to the two-state solution in order to rebuild trust”.
So was he lying in 2009 when he said he had agreed to a Palestinian state?
Bennett has vowed that a Palestinian state will not be established as long as he and his party are part of the government, and has threatened to topple the government if it starts talking with the Palestinians about giving any parts of the West Bank or sharing Jerusalem as a capital of two different states. The American Jewish Committee recently hired him as its first US director of Muslim-Jewish relations.
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In summary, aside from a few gestures, such as occasional displays of disapproval of settlement building in the OPT and John Kerry’s appearance at the futile peace talks in Paris, the Obama administration has been counterproductive with respect to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy.
