David Horovitz and Amir Mizroch
The international community has to "stop speaking in slogans" if it really wants to help the new Israeli government work toward a solution to the Palestinian conflict and help bring stability to the Middle East, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told the Jerusalem Post on Thursday in an interview. Slogans like "occupation," "settlements," "land for peace" and "two-state solution" were both overly simplistic and ignored the root causes of the ongoing conflict, he said. The fact was that the Palestinian issue was "deadlocked" despite the best efforts of a series of Israeli governments.
"Israel has proved its good intentions, our desire for peace," he said. The biggest obstacle to any comprehensive solution, he said, "is not Israel. It is not the Palestinians. It's the Iranians." Nonetheless, Lieberman stressed that Israel did not regard stopping Iran as a precondition for Israeli efforts to make progress with the Palestinians. Quite the reverse, he said. "No, we must start with the Palestinian issues because it's our interest to resolve this problem." (Jerusalem Post)
