Netanyahu blames Gush Etzion stabbing on incitement

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Palestinian incitement drove a stabbing attack in the West Bank earlier in the day.

In a meeting with Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, Netanyahu said that a peace agreement with the Palestinians would only be secured when the Palestinians recognized Israel as a Jewish state.

“Peace demands that the Palestinian leadership finally recognize the nation-state of the Jewish people and peace demands that they cease all incitement against Israel and the Jewish people. Only this morning, Mr. Prime Minister, we saw in Gush Etzion how incitement leads to wanton acts of murderous violence.” he said.

Netanyahu has cast the blame for recent terror attacks on Israeli citizens on the Palestinian leadership’s incitement on several different occasions, including in the immediate aftermath of the Har Nof killings, and the two car-ramming attacks in the capital.

The prime minister on Monday also accused the Palestinians of “hypocrisy” in their denial of the Jewish right to self-determination.

“And it’s indeed a tragedy that so many of our Palestinian neighbors still repudiate the basic facts of history. They deny the more than three-thousand-year-old connection between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel. They reject the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination, even as they demand that very right for themselves,” Netanyahu said.

“Well, peace cannot be based on such hypocrisy,” he added.

Netanyahu referenced remarks made Saturday by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, affirming that the Palestinians would never recognize a Jewish state.

“The peculiar thing is that he said this on the 29th of November, on the very day that 67 years ago the United Nations called for the establishment of a Jewish state,” he said.

Vučić is the first Serbian prime minister to make an official visit to Israel. In a joint press conference, both leaders reaffirmed ties between the two countries, while Vučić called for greater trade collaboration.

In his remarks, Netanyahu hailed the friendship between the two countries, which “goes back to thousands of years, to the time of the Roman Republic,” and continues, he said, through the modern era as both are “united in struggle and in suffering.”

Vučić thanked Israel for its efforts to help with floods that hit the country in May, and said he was “profoundly grateful” to the prime minister for his involvement.

“I am very proud to say today that Serbs, like Jews, we never forget those people that helped us a lot in a most difficult situation that we were faced with,” he said.

The Serbian prime minister also called for greater economic cooperation between the two countries: “I think that we can expand our cooperation and collaboration within the areas of industry, agriculture and IT sector,” he said.