This has the merit of being clear, but which should not help calm the situation. Asked at a press conference in Jerusalem this Monday about the creation of a Palestinian state, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said it was not a “realistic” project at the moment. “A Palestinian state (…) will be a Hamas state,” he added. “I don’t think that position is realistic today, and we have to be realistic.”
“In a word? No,” he replied on 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 Arabia. Saudi Arabia, in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state. These agreements, promoted by the American billionaire during his first term, allowed normalization between Israel and several Arab countries, namely Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.
The Israeli minister made these remarks as an extraordinary summit opens in Riyadh on Monday 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. The Saudi crown prince condemned the “genocide” committed by Israel in Gaza and called for an immediate ceasefire in the Palestinian enclave as well as in Lebanon.
“Some progress” towards a ceasefire in Lebanon
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 (…) did not bring peace, but as we have seen, degraded our security,” declared the minister. Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007, after the Israeli withdrawal, and “we don’t want this to happen in Judea and Samaria” (the name Israelis give to the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967), a- he added.
For his first press conference since taking office a few days ago, the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs considered it “important” to recall that unlike the UN, Israel does not consider “Judea and Samaria” “as occupied territories, but like disputed territories.” Several hundred thousand Jewish settlers live there among 3 million Palestinians.
Gideon Saar also recalled Israel’s conditions before a ceasefire is possible in Lebanon: that “Hezbollah (can) no longer arm itself” and that this Islamist movement be pushed back a good distance from the Israeli-Lebanese border. “There is some progress,” he said in response to a question about the prospects of such a truce, “we are working on the subject with the Americans.”
According to the minister, “the main challenge will be to enforce what has been agreed.” It takes up an idea already expressed by several members of the Israeli government in recent months. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes in particular that only Israel is capable of enforcing an agreement in southern Lebanon, unlike the current situation where this mandate is largely entrusted to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
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