Deputy FM: Palestinians need attitude adjustment before cash

Tzipi Hotovely tells UN donor conference that funding won’t help without change to culture of animosity among Palestinians, accuses Abbas of hypocrisy

By Stuart Winer

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1 October 2015, 3:34 pm

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Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, July 21, 2015. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely told a United Nations donor conference that economic efforts aimed at Mideast peace were useless without the Palestinians changing their attitudes toward Israel.

Hotovely also used the high-level forum to accuse Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of hypocritically exploiting recent violent clashes on the Temple Mount to tar Israel, when he himself is guilty of incitement.

“The conflict will be resolved when the basic values of the Palestinian Authority change,” Hotovely said at the annual donor-pledging conference, when nations commit to funding UN projects. “As long as Palestinian children dream of becoming engineers ‘to blow up Jews,’ none of these economic efforts will achieve their goal.”

The deputy foreign minister was in New York to take part in the UN General Assembly meeting and met with US Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, European Union foreign ministers and ministers from Jordan and Norway, her office said.

“The world is witnessing a broad expansion of radical Islam. Israel has always reflected in its approach a commitment to international law alongside an unwavering campaign against terror,” Hotovely added.

Referring to Abbas’s condemnation of Israel over clashes between security forces and rock-throwing Palestinians on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Hotovely charged that the Palestinian leader was being hypocritical, because he “continues to incite” against the Jewish state.

“I call to restore freedom of worship to the Temple Mount, to stop the violence and to stop the feigned victimhood of Abu Mazen [Abbas] with regard to the Temple Mount at a time when it is he who continues to incite,” she said.

During his Wednesday speech to the UN General Assembly, Abbas warned that Israel was in danger of turning a political conflict into a religious one, saying that its recent actions on the Temple Mount holy site represented an attempt to change the status quo there.

Itamar Sharon and Sara Miller contributed to this report.