Liberman: Breakthrough on peace possible by end of year

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, head of the Yisrael Beytenu party, said Friday that a diplomatic breakthrough on peace was possible by the end of 2015, without Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas leading the Palestinians

Quoting Einstein’s definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, in reference to negotiating with Abbas, Liberman said that an “acceptable assessment is that a real breakthrough is possible by the end of 2015, if we sit down and negotiate with the Palestinians and with moderate Arab states, but to move forward on any kind of process, Abu Mazen [as Abbas is known] must go.”

Liberman said that Israel’s decision to freeze millions of dollars in taxes owed to the Palestinian Authority — withheld after the PA decided to join the International Criminal Court — was not temporary. “It will be in place until he’s out, until there are [Palestinian] elections,” he warned during an interview with Channel 2.

Liberman also said that Israel should think outside the box and sit down for discussions with regional states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf countries in an effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian as well as the wider Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Yisrael Beytenu head has for several months advocated a regional solution to the conflict. “We must reach an overall regional agreement,” Liberman said last June. “Israel’s longstanding conflict is not only with the Palestinians but with the Arab world of which the Palestinians are a part. Therefore, we must reach an agreement that will include the moderate Arab states, the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs.”

Earlier this month, Palestinian media reported that Liberman met in Paris with the ostracized former Palestinian Authority official Mohammad Dahlan, a bitter rival of Abbas, a charge the foreign minister denied on Friday.

“I met with others, I forgot their names,” Liberman deadpanned, before bursting into laughter.

Earlier this week, Liberman presented his party’s old-new program, asserting that Israel needed to annex major settlement blocs in the West Bank and in turn cede areas of sovereign Israeli territory predominantly inhabited by Arab citizens to a future Palestine state. The plan is at the center of Yisrael Beytenu’s electoral platform, as evidenced by its new campaign slogan: “Ariel to Israel, Umm el-Fahm to Palestine.” Ariel is a Jewish city in the West Bank; Umm el-Fahm is an Arab city in the area of Israel known as the “triangle.”

Liberman has long advocated a controversial land swap plan in which towns in “The Triangle” region southeast of Haifa — including heavily populated Arab cities — would become part of a Palestinian state in any peace agreement, and their residents would lose their Israeli citizenship and become citizens of Palestine, in exchange for the Jewish settlement blocs of the West Bank. The proposal could affect some 300,000 Israeli Arabs.

On Thursday, Liberman joined the camp of those warning that an Israeli annexation of the West Bank would lead to an apartheid state.

“What [Naftali] Bennett and his Jewish Home party are proposing is a classical bi-national state,” Liberman declared of his Orthodox-nationalist rivals during a press conference in Tel Aviv, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

“They need to decide if they’re talking about a bi-national state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean such as the president [Reuven Rivlin] speaks about, or whether they’re talking about an apartheid state,” continued the hard-line, unabashedly nationalistic, settlement-residing foreign minister.

Raphael Ahren contributed to this report.