A million little peaces
Netanyahu bashes his opponents for planning to make concessions -- ones he was apparently ready to make himself to Abbas
With elections coming up and tensions between Israel and the Palestinians showing no sign of subsiding, it comes as a surprise that the peace process is back in the news in Friday’s Hebrew press, albeit tangentially.
In case anyone had any doubts as to the paper’s allegiances, Israel Hayom runs a 2,500-word, four-page interview with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the Likud leader tears into his main competitors, Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni. And just in case you’ve been living under a rock and missed his speech earlier this week in Washington, he recaps his main points about the danger posed by Iran.
“I think they’re not appropriate” for the premiership, Netanyahu says of Livni and Herzog. “They won’t stand even one day against the pressures. They won’t stand a single day against the nuclearization of Iran. They themselves already acknowledged that as soon as they’re elected they’ll go to Ramallah and I know what will happen there: they’ll propose to [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] to establish a state which would divide Jerusalem and which will loom above Tel Aviv’s suburbs, as proposed in the past.”
“They will propose to Abbas all the territorial concessions made in the past and will immediately establish here a second Hamas-stan, and then we’ll get a double Iranian threat: the nuclear one and another Iranian offshoot based on (our) borders as well as in the heart of the country,” he says.
While Netanyahu lambastes the center-left leaders for their willingness to concede to the Palestinians, Yedioth Ahronoth publishes a document relating to secret back channel talks between Netanyahu and Abbas. The covert negotiations, which took place before 2013, involve a return to the ’67 lines with land swaps, limited recognition of Palestinian aspirations in East Jerusalem, and limited Palestinian right of return on a person-by-person basis.
“The Israelis who choose to remain in place in a Palestinian state will live under Palestinian law,” the document says, referring to settlers. “There will be complete withdrawal in stages of Israeli forces from the territory of Palestine. The last Israeli forces will be evacuated with the final phase of the agreement.”
A White House official tells Haaretz that Obama is interested in another attempt at pushing for a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians before the end of his term in 2016. How such an effort would pan out will only be decided, however, after the March 17 elections, the paper says.
“We would like to see the formation of the new government in Israel and its attitude to this issue. But in the year-and-a-half to two years that Obama has left in the White House, we will have to deal with this issue because time is working against us,” the official tells Haaretz.
Even though the Islamic State and nuclear Iran have come to the fore of late, the Israeli-Palestinian issue remains on the desks of Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry, the paper says.
Yedioth Ahronoth goes after the Likud party for its campaign ad in which it compares Israeli workers and Hamas by having them both complain in an anti-Netanyahu support group. The party has apologized for the ad and promised to pull it after facing criticism.
After the ad parodied dock workers and compared them to Hamas, the head of the Haifa dockworkers’ union tells the paper that he won’t vote Likud. The ad, Meir Turgeman says, “reveals the true face of the Likud party.”
“I say this as someone who grew up in a house of Likudniks and now, because of Netanyahu, I am not prepared to even listen to this party. Thousands of dock workers and their families who supported Likud are no longer prepared to tolerate the insult that the prime minister cast upon us. I am sure that on the 17th of the month Israeli workers will show the Likud party what they think of it.”
Haaretz, which ordinarily takes a strident tone in criticizing the prime minister, says in its editorial that Netanyahu’s speech to Congress this week offered proposals that “are much more considered than his previous suggestions on the matter, and they are certainly preferable to those of his challengers in the Zionist Union party, who taunt Netanyahu for failing to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
They suggest détente between Iran and the international community, and Iran changing its tone vis-a-vis Israel and abandoning international terrorism. “Netanyahu’s proposals deserve serious discussion after the election, even if Netanyahu loses,” the paper says. “Netanyahu failed not as a result of his ideas, but rather as a result of the way he went about things.”