“In a word? No. » This is how the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs responded to the creation of a Palestinian state. Wanting to establish a Palestinian state is not “today” a “realistic” project, Gideon Saar said on Monday during a press conference in Jerusalem.
He was questioned about the prospect of a relaunch of the so-called Abraham Accords with the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and the possibility of normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, in exchange for creation of a Palestinian state. These agreements, promoted by Donald Trump during his first term, allowed normalization between Israel and several Arab countries, namely Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.
“A State of Hamas”
“A Palestinian state […] will be a Hamas State,” judged Gideon Saar. The Israeli minister made these remarks as an extraordinary summit opens Monday in Riyadh of members of the Arab League, a pan-Arab organization bringing together 22 countries, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a pan-Islamic organization bringing together more than 50 Muslim states.
According to the official Saudi agency SPA, participants will discuss “continued Israeli aggression in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon”, as Riyadh calls for a new “international alliance” aimed at encouraging the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. and sovereign.
A withdrawal which “degraded our security”
In front of the press, Gideon Saar referred to the Oslo peace process, begun in the 1990s, against which the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas fought, whose bloody attack against Israel on October 7, 2023 started the current war.
This process and the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 “not only […] have not brought peace, but as we have seen, have degraded our security,” the minister said. Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007, after the Israeli withdrawal, and “we don’t want this to happen in Judea and Samaria” [le nom que les Israéliens donnent à la Cisjordanie, occupée illégalement par Israël depuis 1967]he added.
