Is Netanyahu shunning Palestinian society and media?

It is a widely acknowledged truth that there is no love lost between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But while the former has made it a habit to host Israelis on a frequent basis, the latter seems wholly uninterested in meeting Palestinians.

Over the past year alone, Abbas hosted Israeli MKs at his presidential compound in Ramallah numerous times, explained his positions to hundreds of Israeli students, and welcomed questions from Israeli journalists in both individual and group meetings.

In December 2012, Abbas created a committee for dialogue with Israeli society, placing Fatah official and former Bethlehem governor Mohammed Al-Madani at its helm. Since the beginning of 2013, Madani told The Times of Israel, Abbas has held dozens of meetings with hundreds of Israelis from all walks of society in a bid to assuage Israeli fears of a Palestinian state.

“Extremism has bred fear within Israeli society,” Madani said. “In his meetings, [Abbas] reassures them, explaining that the Arab Peace Initiative will grant Israel recognition from all Arab and Muslim states when two states are created.”

Madani said he had hoped the Palestinian overtures would be reciprocated by the Israeli side, but to no avail.

“We have asked our Israeli partners many times to arrange a meeting between Palestinian civil society and Mr. Netanyahu, but have so far received no reply,” he said.

Knesset member Hilik Bar (Labor), Madani’s partner in the Israeli parliament, said that his public calls on Netanyahu to host Palestinian delegations in Jerusalem, similar to the Israeli groups he has brought to Ramallah, have fallen on deaf ears.

“In open meetings between a leadership and the public, you can arrive at many insights,” Bar told The Times of Israel, citing Abbas’s clarification — during a meeting with Israeli students in February — of his position on the Holocaust and his acknowledgment that incitement against Israel existed in the Palestinian Authority.

“I don’t control Netanyahu’s schedule, but I certainly think it’s advisable for our leader to meet with broad segments of Palestinian society and explain to them what Israel wants; what Israel will never compromise on. He doesn’t need to give them the answers they want to hear. He doesn’t have to say we’ll agree to [take in] a million refugees; on the contrary. But they need to be able to ask him questions and get answers. I certainly think there should be reciprocity in this issue.

“To be honest, beyond my public statements I’ve never sent [Netanyahu] a letter calling on him to hold such meetings,” Bar added. “Maybe I should have.”

Netanyahu is, of course, not solely to blame for the lack of contact. Following Abbas’s meeting with the Israeli students last February, Laura Talinovsky, executive director of One Voice Israel, a grassroots organization promoting the two-state solution, tried to arrange a similar meeting between Netanyahu and Palestinian students. She said the idea fell through almost as soon as it was raised.

“It was greeted with ridicule not only from Netanyahu’s side but also from the Palestinian students who didn’t want to meet with him,” Talinovsky told The Times of Israel. She noted, however, that Netanyahu had never expressed any interest in meeting Palestinians, unlike Abbas, who, picking up after the summer’s Israel-Hamas conflict, 10 days ago proposed yet another meeting with Israeli students.

However, Ofir Gendelman, Netanyahu’s spokesman for the Arab media, said that meetings between the prime minister and Palestinians scarcely ever take place not because of Netanyahu’s disinterest, but because of a culture of intimidation and anti-normalization prevalent within Palestinian society.

“[Netanyahu] is fully open [to meet],” Gendelman said. “What is needed is that the other side stop politicizing its media. There is a very militant stream within Palestinian society that opposes any contact with Israelis. Even when [Israeli] left-wing activists arrive in Ramallah, there are those who demonstrate against meetings with them. There’s a problem there.”

Palestinian journalists charge, meanwhile, that access to the Israeli prime minister is all but blocked to them. One senior political correspondent, speaking to the Times of Israel on condition of anonymity as his newspaper’s ties with the Prime Minister’s Office “are not entirely severed,” said that Netanyahu has never accepted a single Palestinian request for an interview. (It’s worth noting that Netanyahu hasn’t been at all forthcoming toward Israeli interview requests, either.)

Gendelman, Netanyahu’s spokesman, insisted that no such request has ever been submitted.

“A few years ago, the Americans proposed that Abbas give an interview to Israeli media and Netanyahu reciprocate with an interview to Palestinian media. Abbas agreed while Netanyahu refused,” the Palestinian journalist said. Meanwhile, comments Abbas made to Udi Segal of Channel 2 News in which he said that he had no “right” to return to his native Safed, got him in hot water with Palestinian society.

Gendelman said that attempts to arrange an interview with Netanyahu on official Palestinian TV three-and-a-half years ago never materialized “for various reasons,” insinuating that it was Abbas himself who had blocked the interview.

“Any such interview is dependent on the personal permission of Abu Mazen [Abbas]. Here [in Israel], an interview with Abu Mazen on Israeli TV does not require the prime minister’s permission. The situation in the PA is completely different. There, media is a political matter and there are various restrictions placed on it.”

Netanyahu will probably give an interview to Palestinian media “at some point,” Gendelman speculated, noting that a while ago the prime minister gave interviews to two pan-Arab TV channels: Al-Arabiya and BBC Arabic. The prime minister’s media department is open to queries from Arab journalists “from Iraq to Morocco, including Gaza,” he said.

“Here [in Israel] there are no boycotts. I’m not accused of treason if I speak to certain journalists, unlike the situation on the other side,” Gendelman said.

But the Palestinian political correspondent described a far less rosy reality in his contacts with the Prime Minister’s Office. The few Palestinian journalists who hold Israeli press cards go through such taxing security checks at government press conferences that they often prefer to stay home.

“Netanyahu’s office treats us like terrorists, not like journalists,” he said. “‘Take off your pants, do this, do that.’ No one is willing to go there and be humiliated. It’s as if they’re telling us ‘don’t come.'”

Boycotts and harassment of Israeli journalists are commonplace in the West Bank. Times of Israel’s Avi Issacharoff described a harrowing ordeal in the West Bank in May. But that is not the case at the top level. After Israeli journalists complained to Abbas’s office that no official PA spokesman was available for immediate comment on breaking news, the Palestinian leader appointed Fayez Abbas, a journalist with the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, as his liaison to Israeli media.

“Netanyahu always speaks of ‘reciprocity,’ but we don’t really see it,” the Palestinian journalist said.