Netanyahu spells out essentials for peace deal

JERUSALEM – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland is chief among essential components for a peace deal, days ahead of renewed negotiations.

Netanyahu restated his conditions for a settlement ahead of Thursday’s summit in Washington with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas for the first direct negotiations since talks collapsed in December 2008.
An agreement would have to be based “first of all on recognition of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people, an end to the conflict and an end to further demands on Israel,” Netanyahu said.
The Palestinians, who broke off the talks nearly three years ago after Israel staged a bloody offensive into the Gaza Strip, object to endorsing Israel as essentially Jewish.
Such a move would imply they are dropping their claim that refugees who fled or were expelled when Israel was created in 1948, and their descendants, should be able to reclaim former homes now within Israel.
Netanyahu told reporters that he would also seek “real security arrangements on the ground” to prevent a recurrence in the West Bank of events that took place in the Gaza Strip after Israel pulled out in 2005 and in south Lebanon after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000.
The Islamist Hamas seized control in Gaza and used the coastal strip as a launching pad for attacks into Israel. Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah fought a bloody war with the Jewish state in 2006.
Netanyahu will personally lead the talks and hopes to meet Abbas every two weeks, a senior Israeli official said on Friday.
Key to the discussions will be the future of a partial Israeli moratorium on settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, which expires September 26.
Netanyahu faces strong pressure at home not to renew the freeze on new construction permits, but the Palestinians say Israel must chose between settlements or peace.
“The choice of the Israeli government is settlement or peace, they cannot have both,” chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said on Monday, echoing remarks by Abbas.
Settlements in the West Bank and Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem are considered illegal by the international community.
Meanwhile Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak held talks yesterday in Amman with King Abdullah II ahead of the Washington summit, to which the Jordanian king and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak have been invited.
Abdullah told Barak that the negotiations “should be dealt with in a serious way,” and that Middle East peace was “of strategic interest for the region and the world,” the palace said.
Meanwhile the spiritual head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party in Israel’s ruling coalition has damned Abbas and his people ahead of the Washington summit, stirring an angry reaction from the Palestinians.
“May all the nasty people who hate Israel, like Abu Mazen (Abbas), vanish from our world,” said Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said in a sermon on Saturday. “May God strike them down with the plague along with all the nasty Palestinians who persecute Israel.”
– Nampa-AFP

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