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Monday, February 15, 2010

Lieberman: PA Delegitimizes Us with Our Money

(IsraelNN.com) Much of the international delegitimization against Israel is carried out by the Palestinian Authority (PA), Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Monday in a session of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, adding that some of it is paid for by cash that Israel supplies to the PA,

Most of the legal motions filed against IDF officers are financed by the PA and initiated by it, Lieberman said.

Lieberman said it was not clear if PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, known also as Abu Mazen, represents anyone but himself. “Abu Mazen does not represent the residents of Gaza because Hamas rules there. Seeing as elections in the PA have been postponed three times, one needs to ask whom does Abu Mazen represent. It is not clear that he can supply the goods in negotiations. It is unacceptable that while we cooperate on security, economics and financing, they continue to file lawsuits against us and incite.”

Lieberman said he could not bring himself to trust people who filed legal charges against senior Israeli officials. “In every conversation between Palestinians and senior figures in other countries, the former say they do not trust our sincerity - but I do not believe their sincerity, in view of the boycotts that they are initiating against Israeli goods and the lawsuits. We must examine, as a society, whether we consent to accept these rules of the game – that allow them to negotiate with us while turning many of their resources against us.”

Lieberman said that in his personal view, an arrangement with the Arabs cannot be reached through territorial compromise. He cited the failure of offers made by former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. “It is no accident that for 16 years no arrangement has been reached, even when there were left-wing and centrist governments,” he explained. “There are no offers that go further than what Barak offered at Camp David. The conflict has become a religious one in recent years. As such, there is no possibility of reaching an arrangement through territorial compromise. Therefore we cannot achieve peace according to the offers made by Olmert.”

"We in the Israel Our Home party agree to swapping land and territory, as it says in our platform,” he said. “Today, when the entire Middle East is on fire, whoever says that an arrangement can be reached quickly is planting illusions.”