World Socialist Web Site – January 23, 2024
Netanyahu outlines his plan to ethnically cleanse and seize Gaza for Israel
Jean Shaoul, Chris Marsden
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has bluntly spelled out his plan to ethnically cleanse and then seize Gaza for Israel. In doing so he rejected domestic demands for a ceasefire tied to the release of hostages and denied face-saving claims made by the United States administration to justify its support for genocide that there will be some form of Palestinian mini-state established in its aftermath.
Speaking at a press conference last Thursday, Netanyahu insisted, “I will not compromise on full Israeli security control over all the territory west of the Jordan River”. His statement also prefigures an assault on the West Bank and the seizure of all Palestinian-held territory.
War would “continue until the end, until the victory, until the elimination of Hamas” and “nothing will stop us.” Ending the war prematurely “would harm Israel’s security for generations,” he said, suggesting this could mean military action continuing until next year.
US President Joe Biden responded Saturday with what was reportedly his first phone call with Netanyahu for a month, after which he claimed that the Israeli leader would consider some “type” of two-state solution.
Netanyahu’s spokesman dismissed Biden’s claim Sunday, saying that “In his conversation with President Biden, prime minister Netanyahu reiterated his policy that, after Hamas is destroyed, Israel must retain security control over Gaza to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel, a requirement that contradicts the demand for Palestinian sovereignty.”
Netanyahu said Sunday, “I emphasized to President Biden our determination to achieve all the goals of the war, and to ensure that Gaza never again constitutes a threat to Israel.” Under his leadership, Israel would wage a far wider regional war “on all fronts and in all sectors. We are not giving immunity to any terrorist: not in Gaza, not in Lebanon, not in Syria, and not anywhere.”
Netanyahu and his generals have repeatedly made clear that Israel is waging war not just on the Palestinians but Iran and its allies, with Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declaring that Israel faces a war on seven fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Replying to a reporter who asked why Israel was making do with attacks on Iran’s proxies rather than attacking Iran directly, Netanyahu said, “Who says we aren’t attacking Iran? We are attacking Iran.”
On Friday night, Israeli forces bombed Syria’s capital, Damascus, targeting Iranian forces allied to the Syrian government during NATO’s 13-year war for regime change in the country. Those killed included the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Syria intelligence chief and four other IRGC members.
Emboldened by the prospect of a Trump victory in the US presidential elections in November to openly clash with Biden, Netanyahu threw down the gauntlet to his domestic opponents. Rejecting any possibility of holding elections, he said, “Going to elections would be irresponsible and would badly halt the war effort.”
Politically embarrassed by the confirmation that all talk of a Palestinian state, like appeals for Israel to avoid civilian casualties, is empty rhetoric for public consumption, Biden politely stressed that creating a Palestinian state was “still a possibility.”
A spokesman for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called Netanyahu’s opposition “disappointing”, while the European Union on Monday leaked a policy document asserting that the block will press ahead with peace talks including a two-state solution without the involvement of Israel, because it was “unrealistic to assume that Israelis and Palestinians will in the near future directly engage in bilateral peace negotiations”.
On all fundamentals, Washington is at one with Netanyahu’s war aims, though it needs the fig leaf of a two-state solution to help regional allies including Saudi Arabia and Egypt justify their refusal to come to the aid of the Palestinians.
Israel’s attack on the Palestinians was planned with Washington and designed as the opening move in a military campaign aimed against Iran and its allies, as part of US imperialism’s broader preparations for war against China. Both Washington and its ally London dispatched warships to the Middle East within days of the October 7 attack to secure hegemony over the resource-rich region.
Netanyahu heads a crisis-ridden and deeply unpopular government and his efforts to play to his right-wing constituency have made this worse. Prior to October 7 and Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza, he faced mass protest movements against his far-right coalition.
Anti-Palestinian sentiment over the October 7 incursion and the launching of revenge attacks was used to suppress opposition, but public anger has grown over revelations that the intended attack was known of and allowed to take place in order to provide an excuse for launching war on Gaza. This has been fueled by the massive cost of the war, its brutality and the failure to prioritise the release of hostages.
The prime minister and his Likud party’s poll ratings have plummeted. The opposition National Unity—led by former army chiefs of staff Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both now serving in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid—is predicted to win an election.
On Monday, families of the hostages burst into a session of the Knesset Finance Committee demanding that the government do more to secure their family members’ release. Outside the Knesset, dozens of protesters called for new elections before being dragged away by security officers.
This followed days of small but growing protests in Israel’s major cities calling for talks to halt the war and secure the immediate release of the remaining 140 hostages, with some protesters also calling for fresh elections. On Saturday, thousands took part in a demonstration in Tel Aviv, whose streets are plastered with signs reading “Bring Them Home” and demanding the immediate dissolution of the Knesset and fresh elections.
Hundreds of anti-war protesters, organized by Partnership for Peace, a coalition of civil society groups, took part in a demonstration in the mixed city of Haifa calling for an end to the war, a hostage deal and elections. The protest had initially been banned by the police and was only allowed after an appeal to the Supreme Court and the imposition of a 700 attendee maximum.
The protests, though much smaller than last year’s demonstrations against Netanyahu’s attacks on Israel’s Supreme Court, suffer from the same political weaknesses. A retired general, Nimrod Sheffer, spoke at the Haifa demonstration and called on Eisenkot and Gantz to “choose whether you are in the government and continue to serve the government, or leave it now and start serving the people. The Israeli Knesset must return the mandate to the people, now.”
Demands for a ceasefire, the release of the hostages and fresh elections can never be achieved by appealing to the war criminals Eisenkot and Gantz. Both will continue to wage war alongside Netanyahu for as long as this is required. Speaking of Gaza, Gantz has declared, “The war here is for our existence and for Zionism, and so I can’t provide an estimate of the length of each stage in the war and the fighting that will continue after. We can’t retreat from our strategic objective,” and “On the question of the operation’s length, there are no limitations.”
Their pledge to the Israeli bourgeoisie and to US imperialism is that should a change of government become necessary, then National Unity and its coalition partners will continue to wage the war, only more effectively—especially in combining genocide in Gaza with the broader regional conflict with Iran and its allies.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Eisenkot declared his support for a temporary pause in the fighting for talks to secure the release of the hostages, to maintain public support for the escalating war. But he followed these remarks with the declaration, “For me, the mission to save civilians comes before killing the enemy. The enemy can be killed afterward.”
Eisenkot boasted of how the decision by National Unity to join the war cabinet and wage Israel’s genocide in Gaza had prevented Netanyahu plunging Israel into a disaster. According to the Times of Israel, “on October 11, Israel was on the verge of striking Hezbollah but he and Gantz managed to convince Netanyahu and the war cabinet to hold off. ‘Our presence there prevented Israel from making a grave strategic error,’ Eisenkot said.
“Had a decision been made to attack Hezbollah, ‘we would have fulfilled [Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya] Sinwar’s strategic vision’ of bringing about a regional war, he said. The entire axis —‘Syria, Iraq, Iran’ — would have gotten involved, he said, and then ‘[the war against] Hamas, which caused us the greatest damage since the establishment of the state, would have become a secondary arena,’ he said.”
The Times of Israel adds, “Nonetheless, he did not rule out the potential for escalation to war.”
Creating the political conditions for continuing an agenda of genocide and war is what preoccupies Eisenkot and Gantz. The former explained that while both would continue for now to take full part in the war cabinet, “It is necessary, within a period of months, to bring the Israeli voter back to the polls and hold elections in order to renew trust, because right now there is no trust.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/22/wtbu-j22.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Chris Hedges – January 22, 2024
The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse
By Chris Hedges
Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.
Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.
In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.
Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.
“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one. We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you. The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”
The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”
While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.
As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.”
He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza.
Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.
And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brickﾠtold the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.
“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank.
When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”
He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.
Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.
Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military.
While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.
In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.
“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”
Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:
At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.
He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018.
An article in April 2021 titled ﾓBrett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:
A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.”
[….]
A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”
Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.
[….]
McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.
Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.
In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”
McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it. McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority — an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu.
The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.
The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israelﾒs genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.
The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7.
Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2019).
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-four-horsemen-of-gazas-apocalypse
Israeli foreign minister presents idea for artificial island off Gaza
Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz on Monday presented his idea for the creation of an internationally financed and owned artificial island three miles off the coast of Gaza that in his view would “promote deep positive changes in the Gaza Strip and a better future in the Middle East” during a meeting in Brussels.
The video, titled ﾓThe Gaza Artificial Island Initiative,ﾔ which was presented to the European Union’s first Foreign Affairs Council meeting of the year, says that the current state of affairs isn’t satisfactory to either Israel or the Palestinians.
The Irish Times explainsﾠKatz floated the artificial island idea again back in 2017, with an unnamed official present in Monday’s meeting telling the news outlet they found his presentation “very bizarre.”
“Construction of an artificial island with a port and civilian infrastructure installations off the coast of Gaza will provide the Palestinians a humanitarian, economic and transportation gateway to the world, without endangering Israel’s security,” the narrator of the video states.
According to Katz’s vision, Israel would control security around the island and inspect the port, while an international policing force would maintain public order on the island itself. But it was unclear if the proposal involved the relocation of Palestinians to the new island.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, told reporters Katz showed two videos during their meeting, both of which “had little or nothing to do with the issue we were discussing,” according to a translation of his remarks. The second video involved the creation of a railway line linking the Middle East to India.
While Borrell said he found both videos “very interesting,” he added: “I believe that the minister could have made better use of his time to worry about the security of his country and the high number of deaths in Gaza,” according to translation of his remarks.
There appears to be growing concern internationally about the dire conditions in Gaza as the civilian death toll nears 25,500, according to local officials, and how Israel envisions the future for Gaza and Palestinians once the fighting ends.
Israel’s Intelligence Ministry last year draftedﾠa “concept paper” that would involve the transfer of all Palestinians in Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, according to The Associated Press.
The Palestinian Authority denounced the Israeli proposal.
“We are against transfer to any place, in any form, and we consider it a red line that we will not allow to be crossed,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said in late October.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly thrown cold water on the idea of a two-state solution, which the U.S., one of Israel’s biggest backers amid the war, has been pushing for.
“My insistence is what has prevented — over the years — the establishment of a Palestinian state that would have constituted an existential danger to Israel,” Netanyahu said Sunday. “As long as I am prime minister, I will continue to strongly insist on this.”
Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian foreign minister who held separate talks with the EU Foreign Affairs Council, said he expected the EU to condemn Netanyahu’s words.
“I expect from you to start contemplating sanctions against Netanyahu and others who are really destroying the chances for a two-state solution and for peace in the Middle East,” al-Maliki said.
Borrell noted the Israeli government’s position on the issue, but said he was unsure about what other options they were considering, while he said it was the bloc’s “moral obligation” to try to advance the two-state solution.
“Which are the other solution they have in mind?” he asked. “To make all the Palestinians leave? To kill [all] of them?”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/artificial-island-plan-israel-katz_n_65af9e75e4b0d65b024def80#:~:text=Israel's%20Foreign%20Minister%20Israel%20Katz,during%20a%20meeting%20in%20Brussels.
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