Wanting to establish a Palestinian state is not “today” a “realistic” project, declared Monday the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Saar, while the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, recalled his attachment to Palestinian “sovereignty”.
During a press conference in Jerusalem, the new head of Israeli diplomacy 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 the creation of a Palestinian state.
“In a word? No,” replied Mr. Saar.
“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.”
The Abraham Accords, promoted by Mr. Trump during his first term, allowed normalization between Israel and several Arab countries, namely Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.
Commemorating 20 years since the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, on the contrary, advocated a fully sovereign Palestinian state.
“We are committed to peace and we will continue to work to achieve it,” said the president of the Palestinian Authority in a speech reported by the national Wafa agency.
“Security and stability can only be achieved by eliminating the occupation and achieving sovereignty and independence over the territory of the Palestinian state,” he said.
– Sovereign –
An extraordinary summit 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, opened Monday in Riyadh.
According to the official Saudi agency SPA, the participants were to discuss “continued Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.”
Riyadh is calling for a new “international alliance” aimed at encouraging the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.
In front of the press, Mr. 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, Mr. Saar considered it “important” to recall that unlike the UN, Israel does not consider “Judea and Samaria” “as occupied territories , but as disputed territories”.
Several hundred thousand Jewish settlers live there among three million Palestinians.
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