Israel's Lieberman: PA illegitimate

26/12/2010

JERUSALEM (AFP) -- Israel's fiery Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday that Israel should not sign a peace deal with the Western-backed Palestinian government because it is illegitimate.

"It is forbidden for us to reach a comprehensive deal today with the Palestinians. To put it clearly, you have to understand that their government is not legitimate," he told a meeting in Jerusalem of Israeli ambassadors.

Lieberman pointed to the fact that the government of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas had lost control of the Gaza Strip to rival Hamas and postponed elections after its term had expired.

"It is a government that has postponed elections three times, that lost elections, that does not hold elections, does not plan to hold elections and there are no guarantees that next time they do hold elections, that Hamas won't win again," Lieberman said.

He also said the Palestinians would reject any deal from Israel, no matter how generous, and that there were unbridgeable gaps on Israeli security issues.

"Even if we offer the Palestinians Tel Aviv and go back to the 1947 borders, they would find reasons not to sign a peace deal with us," he said.

The Palestinian Authority, dominated by Abbas's secular Fatah movement, has repeatedly postponed national and local elections, while Hamas has refused to let them be held in Gaza.

Hamas, which won a landslide victory in the last parliamentary elections in 2006, has said there can be no new elections without reconciliation with Fatah.

The Islamist movement seized power in Gaza in June 2007 when it ousted forces loyal to Abbas in a week of bloody street battles, the culmination of years of struggle between the two main Palestinian movements.

The two groups struggled for months to reach a unity deal under Egyptian mediation but the efforts collapsed late last year when Hamas refused to agree to a proposal that was signed by Fatah.

Lieberman, the hardline leader of the Yisrael Beitenu party, has been largely sidelined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in peace talks with the Palestinians.

Direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the first for nearly two years, began in Washington on September 2 but quickly stalled when a 10-month Israeli settlements freeze expired on September 26.

Source: Ma'an News Agency.
Link: http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=345637.