Mar. 20, 2015

Netanyahu: “I Want a Sustainable, Peaceful Two-State Solution” – Andrea Mitchell
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel discussed a future Palestinian state in an interview with NBC News on Thursday. “I never retracted my speech in Bar-Ilan University six years ago calling for a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognized the Jewish state. What has changed is the reality. Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas], the Palestinian leader, refuses to recognize the Jewish state, he’s made a pact with Hamas that calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, and every territory that is vacated today in the Middle East is taken up by Islamist forces….I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution. But for that, circumstances have to change.”
“If you want to get peace, you’ve got to get the Palestinian leadership to abandon their pact with Hamas and engage in genuine negotiations with Israel for an achievable peace. We have to also make sure that we don’t have ISIS coming in to that territory. It’s only two dozen miles away from our border. It’s thousands of miles away from yours. So we need the conditions of recognition of a Jewish state and real security in order to have a realistic two-state solution. And I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable.”
“I’m very proud of the fact that Israel is the one country in a very broad radius in which Arabs have free and fair elections….I said I’m concerned with the massive foreign-funded effort…that would try to get out votes for a specific party….I was trying to get something to counter a foreign-funded effort to get votes that are intended to topple my party, and I was calling on our voters to come out.”  (NBC News)