(Jerusalem Post) Herb Keinon - Prime Minister Netanyahu's office issued a statement Tuesday explaining a cable that seemed to quote him as supporting a land swap with the Palestinians. At a meeting Netanyahu held with a congressional delegation led by Maryland Sen. Benjamin Cardin just after the February 2009 elections - according to the cable - the incoming prime minister "expressed support for the concept of land swaps, and emphasized that he did not want to govern the West Bank and Gaza but rather to stop attacks from being launched from there." Netanyahu has never publicly agreed to the idea - accepted by the Olmert government - that Israel would "swap" land inside the Green Line with the Palestinians for any land beyond the Green Line that would be retained by Israel as part of a final agreement. While the term "land swaps" appears in the opening paragraph of the cable, it does not appear later on in the document, where the details of the conversation are presented. This led one Israeli official to say that the term, which does not appear in the document in quotation marks, had been inserted in an interpretative manner by the diplomat who wrote the cable. According to the cable, Netanyahu said there were three options: "withdrawing to the 1967 borders (that would 'get terror, not peace'); doing nothing ('just as bad'); or 'rapidly building a pyramid from the ground up.' Netanyahu suggested a rapid move to develop the West Bank economically, including 'unclogging' bureaucratic 'bottlenecks.'" Netanyahu "promised that as Prime Minister his government would not 'go back' to unilateral withdrawals," the cable said. He also warned that if Iran attained a nuclear bomb, any result from negotiations with the Palestinians would be "washed away."
2010-12-01 08:00:16Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive