calling for an international peace conference and, if that doesn’t work, recognizing a Palestinian state. What is your position on that?
We still need to understand a little bit better what exactly the French are putting on the table because we’ve had some preliminary discussions with them, but I hope over the next few months we will see more details of what their proposal is.
My personal view is that it is not for us in the international community to tell you guys and the Palestinians how to come together. It is for us to actually help create the conditions which will bring people together around a negotiated solution.
We all agree the way forward, the way out of this conflict is through negotiations.
It is not through violence. It is not through stabbings. It’s not through fighting. It is through sitting down and negotiating based on all the issues that have been discussed in the past.
What is the format in which you sit, how you sit down to do that, how the international community comes to support this process is something we can talk about. But the fact that you do need a negotiated solution, I don’t think anyone questions that.
Are you going to do what you do each month at the UN, list how many incidents of violence, how many houses in settlements were built. Is that what will go in the paper, or something wider?
No, we will look at the bigger impediments and risks to the two-state solution.
On the one side, you have settlements and obviously settlement expansion, demolition of houses, these are two impediments to a two-state solution.
You see the resurgence of violence – that is also not helping a two-state solution, neither is incitement. So all these things need to be spoken out a little bit more clearly and identified more clearly so that political leaders can focus on dealing with them, rather than just avoiding things.
You said the goal is to return to negotiations and a negotiated solution. The PA foreign minister, Riad al-Maliki, said in Japan that the Palestinians are done with negotiations, that they don’t think it will help them and they are going to go in different ways now. Do those kind of comments have a sobering effect on this type of plan? Do you take them seriously, or is it just rhetoric?
No, we take everything seriously.
But, at the end of the day, we look at what is not just the situation on the ground, but what is the most reasonable way forward. I will not be convinced that stabbing a person in the street will bring a Palestinian state into existence, but I will also not be convinced that just putting a checkpoint, or moving the army from one area to another area, will strengthen security for Israelis.
Therefore, the only way forward is actually to have peaceful negotiations that reach the goal of having two states. But, if I were to say to you today, let’s get the president and prime minister in the same room tomorrow, that would be daydreaming.
Our role is to actually figure out how we can create the conditions under which such a process can resume in a meaningful manner.
Read more:
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Daydreaming-to-think-Israel-PA-can-negotiate-now-445567
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