A woman cannot drive a car or show her face in the Arab world.... And yet this fact is largely ignored by all of the left :
Of the 300 million Arab citizens across the region, he said, only the one million who are Arab citizens of Israel now enjoy the democratic rights those protesters seek.
“Israel,” he said, “fully supports the desire of the Arab people in our region to live freely.”
WASHINGTON — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu capped off a turbulent visit to Washington on Tuesday with a speech to a more sympathetic audience in Congress than he found at the White House, promising peace negotiations aimed at “a far-reaching compromise” with the Palestinians but setting several significant limits on what Israel would accept.
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"Netanyahu is the same kind of cynical politician we find here on the right: willfully misunderstanding the President for his own political purposes. He has no interest in peace whatsoever."
rudolph91, Claremont, CA
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He said that to reach a deal, Palestinians must agree to live with a Jewish state that would include areas in the suburbs of Jerusalem and around Tel Aviv.
Jerusalem, he said, “will never be divided,” and Israel’s army would remain along the Jordan River.
While some land where Israelis have settled would lie outside its final borders, he said, the borders would not be identical to those of 1967 and before, which he once again called indefensible. Palestinian refugees and their descendants, he said, would have to find their homes outside these borders, limiting their right of return to old homelands — long a sticking point.
“I am willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historic peace,” he said, adding that it would not be easy, because “in a genuine peace, we will be required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland.”
Palestinian reaction to the speech came swiftly, and it was just as strongly negative as the reaction from Congress was favorable. In the West Bank, Nabil Shaath, a senior Palestinian official, called the speech "a declaration of war against the Palestinians."
"This is an escalation and unfortunately, it received a standing ovation," he told The Associated Press. He noted that Mr. Netanyahu had rejected Palestinian demands on issues as central as future borders, the status of Jerusalem and the fate of refugees.
Mr. Netanyahu’s speech culminated a tumultuous five days begun last Thursday when President Obama called for negotiations toward the creation of a Palestinian state on Israel’s pre-1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps. Mr. Netanyahu initially reacted furiously to Mr. Obama’s announcement, but in the past few days has sought to emphasize the areas where the two men are in agreement.
The notion of a return to anything like the pre-1967 borders that bounded Israel before the Six Day War drew fierce criticism from Israel and many of its supporters, even though in Mr. Obama’s formulation it would include adjustments that would require negotiations over Jewish settlements built up since then. Mr. Netanyahu said that he was willing to engage in that kind of negotiation.
He broke no new ground on other particulars of the peace process, but he was never expected to do so in this setting, as Israeli officials pointed out that Mr. Netanyahu would hardly lay out new proposals to an American audience without telling his own people about them first.
Mr. Netanyahu’s speech, delivered before the grand platform of a joint meeting of Congress, had many of the trappings of a State of the Union address, albeit on a smaller scale. With elections coming up next year, lawmakers appeared eager to demonstrate their support for Israel as part of an effort to secure backing from one of American politics’ most powerful constituencies, American Jews. And Mr. Netanyahu seemed just as keen to demonstrate to Mr. Obama, who is abroad this week, the enthusiastic bipartisan support for Israel’s leader.
Referring to the unity agreement reached last month between the Fatah movement, which is backed by Western powers, and Hamas, the Islamist group that the United States considers a terrorist organization, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel would not negotiate “with a Palestinian version of Al Qaeda — that we will not do.”
“So I say to President Abbas, tear up your pact with Hamas, sit down and negotiate, make peace with the Jewish state.”
Mr. Netanyahu said that the Palestinian leader must do what he has done: “I stood before my people and I said, ‘I will accept a Palestinian state.’ It’s time for President Abbas to stand before his people and say, ‘I will accept a Jewish state.’ ”
He added: “Those six words will convince the people of Israel that they have a true partner for peace. With those six words, the Israeli people will be prepared to make a far-reaching compromise. I will be prepared to make a far-reaching compromise.”
balance here :
nytimes.com |
