There’s zero trust between Israel and the Palestinians, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said Friday night, voicing scant hope for a peace agreement by the end of the nine month period allotted for the American-brokered peace talks.
Speaking in Washington at the Brookings Institute’s Saban Forum on ”US-Israel Relations in a Dynamic Middle East,” Liberman said negotiations with the Palestinians must start “not from security and not from refugees, but from some simple thing I call trust, confidence, credibility.”
“Without trust and credibility — mission impossible,” he said. The foreign minister said past treaties were made between Israeli and Palestinian rulers, not the respective peoples.
“I think we must reach a real comprehensive solution with the Palestinians and not with the rulers,” he said.
While he expressed gratitude for US Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to bring the two sides together, “to keep this process alive,” and reach a negotiated resolution to the decades-long conflict, Liberman expressed doubt that there’d be an agreement in the coming year.
“To speak frankly,” said Liberman, “I don’t believe it is possible in the next year to achieve [a] comprehensive solution, to achieve some breakthrough, but I think it’s crucial to keep our dialogue, because we live in the same region, we’re neighbors. It’s important at least to think about coexistence.”
Liberman, head of the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu party, said he continued to support a two-state solution, and reiterated his backing for a land and population swap with the Palestinians — a plan which would involve the forced transfer of some Israeli Arabs to Palestinian Authority control.
“We’re ready to share this small land,” he said, saying he was even willing to leave his home at the West Bank settlement of Nokdim should there be hope of a guaranteed negotiated resolution to the conflict. He rejected outright the term “occupation” in the context of Israel’s presence in the West Bank, however, and said the conflict with the Palestinians was not a matter of territory. ”To speak of occupation is not to understand the history of this region and the facts.”
He said the Israeli government must break out of its deadlock with the Palestinians, take a step back and reevaluate its policies.
“All of our direction on the Palestinian issue is the wrong direction; we must take some time out for a policy review,” he said.
Should peace talks break down, Liberman said he opposed unilateral Israeli action to withdraw from the West Bank, as Israel did from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
“I don’t believe in unilateral steps,” he said twice in his talk with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, noting the thousands of rockets fired at Israel in the eight years since it left the Palestinian territory, which was taken over by Hamas in 2007.
Turning to the Iranian issue, Liberman reiterated his opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public airing of dirty laundry with the United States over the interim deal reached with Iran in Geneva last month. “It’s unnecessary to discuss public disagreements publicly,” he said. “I think to cool down the atmosphere is also very crucial today.”
While he acknowledged that Israel sought to diversify its allegiances in the international arena, he said there was no replacement for its close alliance with Washington.
“We don’t have any alternative to the United States,” Liberman said, but added that “we can’t disregard Russia” from the Middle East equation.
He is giving Washington too much power over Israel’s fate.
A reminder Avigdor Lieberman is wedded to the same failed so-called two state solution as his boss Netanyahu.
Let’s point out since the Palestinian Arabs don’t want peace, why is Israel sitting in the room with them essentially negotiating the terms of its own demise?
Lieberman doesn’t answer that question nor does he tell us why in spite of the Arabs’ unremitting hate for the Jews, that they would ever be ready to share the land with the Jews!
Israel’s leaders live in complete denial of reality.