Netanyahu: Abbas unwilling to give up on Haifa, Jaffa

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday accused Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas of being unwilling to give up claims to the Israeli cities of Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa.

The prime minister also accused Palestinians of teaching their children to hate Jews, and expressed confidence a controversial measure forcing foreign-funded NGOs to disclose the sources of their money would pass, during a weekly Likud Knesset faction meeting.

Days after Israel seemed to outright reject a French proposal for new peace talks — with the alternative being outright recognition by France of a Palestinian state — Netanyahu said Palestinian Authority President Abbas was unwilling to give an inch in negotiations.

“The heart of the conflict is not the settlements, it’s about Acre, Haifa and Jaffa,” the prime minister said. “[Abbas] can’t compromise, because he’s afraid to come to talks in which he will have to give up on Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre.”

A number of maps used by Palestinians include the area that is present-day Israel, and Haifa, Jaffa and Acre are still referred to by some as Palestinian cities. Abbas caused a stir in November when he told Israel’s Channel 2 news he didn’t believe he had the right to return to live in his hometown of Safed in the north of Israel. A few days later he clarified to an Egyptian TV station that he was simply staking out a “personal position.”

In Monday’s faction meeting, after screening a video on Palestinian incitement the prime minister maintained the hateful rhetoric was also at the “heart of the conflict.”

“In Israel, we teach our children technology, tolerance, and accepting the other, and there [the Palestinians] teach them that the Jews are the descendants of monkeys and pigs, that the ‘occupied areas’ of Acre, Jaffa and Haifa must be liberated, and that Jews must be killed,” the prime minister said.

On Friday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius suggested convening an international peace meeting between Netanyahu and Abbas and said if that failed, Paris would recognize the state of Palestine.

Jerusalem reacted by accusing the French of making a one-sided ultimatum, but said it would consider the proposal.

“The substance of negotiations is compromise and the French initiative, as it has been reported, in effect gives the Palestinians in advance reasons not to do so,” Netanyahu said Sunday. “We are prepared to enter into direct negotiations without preconditions and without dictated conditions.”

Netanyahu at the faction meeting also defended the contentious NGO bill, which would require organizations who receive the majority of their funding from foreign governments to mark their documents as such.

“The law is correct, democratic, necessary, and it will pass,” he said.

If Israel would fund such groups in other countries, contended Netanyahu, there would be a “terrible outcry.”

“Today, there will be a no-confidence vote on the ‘NGO bill’ [the vote was later postponed]. I fail to imagine a scenario in which the State of Israel would fund organizations supporting Basque separatists, or in Corsica, or other places,” he said. “There would be a terrible outcry.”

The goal of the NGO bill is “to bring transparency regarding the activities of other countries in our democracy,” he said. The people opposing it, he said, “are those who generally side with transparency.”

The prime minister also hailed the “infiltration law” up for Knesset vote on Monday — which would limit the detention time for migrants to 12 months — and praised Israeli efforts to block illegal migration to the Jewish state.

“Israel is one of the only Western countries that has managed to contain this illegal infiltration,” he said. “We did it with our fence on the Egyptian border, and we are doing it through legislation.”