The Palestinians must "recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people" in order to achieve real peace, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
"The Palestinians must abandon their refusal to recognise the right of the Jewish people to their national state," he said in a speech at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
Such recognition was "a condition for reaching an agreement at the end of negotiations, but not for launching them", he said.
Peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis were relaunched in July under the auspices of the United States after nearly three years of impasse. The direct talks, which are being held in Israel and the West Bank under a US-imposed media blackout, have been set to last nine months, and have so far yielded no concrete results.
"The root of the conflict is the Jewish state," Netanyahu said, refuting the argument that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and settlement there were the cause of the decades-old confrontation with the Palestinians.
| Since the Paleos were all wound up even before the evil Joooz had beaten Jordan in the 1967 war... |
| They've been wound up since the 1920s, long before Israel was made an independent nation by the U.N. |
"Are you finally ready to recognise the Jewish state, the national state of the Jewish people?" he asked, directly addressing Palestinian leaders, deploring that their response so far to that question has been "no".
"So long as the Palestinians do not recognise this right, there will be no true peace," the premier warned his audience at the Bar Ilan auditorium.
| It's good that he says this, and it's a shame the world won't hear it... |
As for other conditions to a final peace agreement, Netanyahu urged the Palestinians to "renounce the right of return" for refugees, and reiterated the need for "solid security arrangements that meet the real security needs of Israel". |
