Netanyahu accepts demilitarized Palestinian state

The prime minister promised no new settlements, but said that normal life in existing settlements must continue.

Israel is prepared to see a demilitarized Palestinian state arise, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said tonight. Netanyahu was speaking at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, in response to the speech by US President Barack Obama at Cairo University two weeks ago.

Netanyahu also declared that his government had no intention of setting up new settlements or of taking land to expand existing ones. He did however stress that normal life in the settlements demanded that people should have room to raise children, in other words that construction to accommodate natural growth will continue.

"I don’t want war," Netanyahu said, "No-one in Israel wants war. If we work together, there is no end to the prosperity we can bring to our peoples."

Netanyahu said there must be explicit, binding recognition by the Palestinians of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people. He stipulated that a Palestinian state must be demilitarized, with effective control on entry of arms, and must not control its airspace or form alliances with hostile neighboring states. He also declared that the solution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees would be solely within the territory of the Palestinians, and not within Israel, and that Jerusalem would remain united.

In an initial response by the Palestinian side, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told television network Al Jazeera that in his speech, Netanyahu had unilaterally buried negotiations on a permanent settlement of the dispute, and that he would have to wait 1,000 years before he heard a single Palestinian willing to cooperate with his declarations at Bar Ilan.

Netanyahu asserted that the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel did not derive from the persecutions and catastrophes it had undergone, but from the fact that this was the land of the people's birth. He said that settlements were not the obstacle to peace, and that so far Israeli withdrawals from territory had brought only suicide bombers and rockets. He identified the root cause of the Israeli-Arab dispute as the refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a Jewish state in the land of Israel. However, he went on to say that the right to statehood of the Palestinians living in the land must also be recognized.

Netanyahu said he had told President Obama that if they could agree on the substance, terminology would not be a problem, and that if his conditions were fulfilled, it would be possible to agree to a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on June 14, 2009

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2009

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