(Prime Minister's Office) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Saban Forum by video on Sunday: "The terrorists are attacking in California or in Israel, or for that matter in Paris. They are attacking the very values that we hold dear - freedom, tolerance, diversity. All the things that define the value of life and society in our eyes, they find anathema and that's why they attack us....They think that we are hedonistic and weak; we're actually very strong societies, very resilient, because of the very values that they despise so much." "Many used to say that the core of the conflicts in the Middle East, and from there the rest of the world, were rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That was never true, but it's now demonstrably false. And what we see is the old order established after the Ottoman Empire collapsing and militant Islam, either of the Shiite hue led by Iran, or the Sunni hue led by ISIS, rushing in to fill the void." "Insofar as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is concerned...people have long said that the core of this conflict is the acquisition of territories by Israel in the 1967 War. That's...not the core of the conflict. In Gaza...we gave territory and got 15,000 rockets on our heads. We took out all the settlements; we disinterred people from their graves; and did we get peace? No. We got the worst terror possible." "In the West Bank...in order for us to ensure that it doesn't happen again, we have to address the root cause of the problem. Why has this conflict not been resolved for a hundred years? Why has it not been resolved after successive Israeli prime ministers, six in fact after the Oslo Agreement, have offered to make peace, have offered the Palestinians the possibility of building a state next to Israel? It's because the Palestinians have not yet been willing to cross that conceptual bridge, that emotional bridge, of giving up the dream not of a state next to Israel, but a state instead of Israel." "Ultimately the only workable solution is not a unitary state, but a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state....But the Palestinians...refuse to recognize a nation-state for the Jewish people in any boundary. That was and remains the core of the conflict. Not this or that gesture or the absence of this or that gesture, but the inability or unwillingness of the Palestinian leadership to make the leap."
2015-12-07 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive