ISRAELI Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who prides himself on being undiplomatic, lashed out yesterday at the peace negotiations with the Palestinians launched last week in Washington and criticised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for trying to whip up enthusiasm for something that was “unachievable”.
“There will be no peace, not next year and not for the next generation,” Mr Lieberman said in a meeting with 1000 members of his Yisrael Beitainu (Israel is Our Home) Party. The Palestinian Authority was incapable, he said, of signing a peace agreement that met Israel’s needs.
“No historical compromise and no painful concessions will do,” he said, phrases Mr Netanyahu used in Washington last week in promoting the peace process.
What Israel should strive for instead, Mr Lieberman proposed, was a long-term interim agreement aimed at avoiding an outbreak of violence.
A number of senior Israeli analysts also believe the most realistic goal Israel should strive for at present is an interim agreement, particularly because the division of power between Fatah and Hamas makes any agreement with the Palestinians unstable.
However, it is highly unusual for a foreign minister to be at the head of the anti-peace camp and to indirectly mock his own prime minister for seeking a peace agreement.
Mr Lieberman derisively referred to peace conferences with the Palestinians as “grandiose productions of the international peace industry” fuelled by cocktail parties and television appearances. “We are not averse to a peace agreement,” he said, “just not adventures and illusions.” Israel had suffered enough, he said, “from the adventures and experiments of irresponsible politicians.” He did not name Mr Netanyahu but didn’t have to.
An unnamed Israeli minister quoted in the Israeli media last night noted that foreign ministers are usually to the left politically of their prime ministers. “Imagine how we would react if a Palestinian foreign minister said peace was impossible,” he said. “We would jump down his throat.”
A Palestinian government spokesman, Ghassan Khatib, said that even if Mr Lieberman had little influence on Israeli government policy, “he is still the Foreign Minister” and, together with like-minded ministers, a major impediment to the peace process.
Mr Netanyahu is unlikely to confront Mr Lieberman at this point since his party is his major coalition partner. However, if a draft agreement with the Palestinians becomes realistic, the replacement of extreme-right coalition partners with the moderate Kadima party, now in opposition, is inevitable.
Mr Lieberman, 52, immigrated to Israel in 1978 from the former Soviet Union where he was a nightclub bouncer as a young man.
He established his party a decade ago as a political base for fellow Russian-speaking immigrants but it has since drawn other Israelis attracted by his hardline attitude towards the Arabs, particularly Israeli Arabs who support the Palestinian cause.
Be the first to comment