Israel Matzav

And you didn't think anyone was that blind anymore

On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu found himself in the awkward position of having to explain to French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius that Israel's conflict with the 'Palestinians' is not the central conflict of the Middle East.

The root of the area’s instability, Netanyahu said in a public statement made alongside Fabius before the two met in Jerusalem, is the regional rejection of modernity, moderation, progress and political solutions.

“I say that because for too long people believed that the root cause of this instability in the Middle East was the Palestinian-Israeli problem. It is not the root cause; it’s one of its results,” he said.

“If we have peace with the Palestinians, the centrifuges will not stop spinning in Iran, the turmoil will not stop in Syria, the instability in North Africa will not cease, the attacks on the West will not cease,” he added.

Netanyahu seemed to be responding directly to comments Fabius made Saturday in Ramallah, after meting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Even if we speak of other neighboring countries – the dramatic conflict in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt – the fact remains that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is one of the issues, perhaps the central one, for the region,” Fabius said.

After meeting Netanyahu, Fabius said at a solo press conference that while in the past the Israeli-Palestinian conflict burned while the rest of the region was relatively quiet, now the situation was reversed.

But, he said, it would be a “grave mistake” to follow those saying that this was not the time to move on the Israeli-Palestinian track because of everything else happening in the region.
“I think it is necessary to take advantage of a situation where there it is relative quiet,” he said, adding that the quiet demonstrated a “change of mentality” that needed to be harnessed for moving the process forward.

While acknowledging that an Israeli-Palestinian accord would not solve all the problems in the region, Fabius said that if Israel and the Palestinian Authority could be turned into an “island of stability” it would be easier to deal with the other problems.

If there's a car accident, God forbid, and you have one person what a broken arm and one person whose arm is hanging by a thread, which one do you treat first? Fabius is arguing that it's the one with the broken arm. He would let the person whose arm is hanging by a thread bleed to death. Does that make any sense?

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, France, Laurent Fabius, Middle East peace process, Palestinian state, two-state solution

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:21 AM