Prime Minister Netanyahu on Tuesday called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, saying: "Just say the six words – 'I will accept the Jewish state."
In an address to an assembly of the Jewish Agency Board of Trustees, Netanyahu said:
This conflict is about the Jewish State. It’s about the persistent refusal to accept that the Jews have a right for a nation-state of their own and anybody’s. It precedes the question of boundaries; it precedes the question of territorial dispute; it is a dispute against our very right to exist as a sovereign Jewish State. It has always been that. It’s just been masked but it explains why this conflict extended itself for half a century – from 1920 till 1967 when there were no “territories”; no Israeli soldiers in Judea, Samaria or Gaza; no refugees for half that time; and Jerusalem was divided. Half of it was in Arab hands, but there was for fifty years this horrible conflict. What was it about? It was about our existence as a Jewish State; a refusal to accept this idea of Zionism before the establishment of the State and a refusal to accept the idea of a Jewish State after it’s existed. And that has not disappeared.
"I stood before my people, people of Israel and I said numerous times that I will accept a Palestinian state. Now President Abbas must stand before his people and he has to say these six word, 'I will accept the Jewish State'."
"I will repeat this over and over and over again because it is the attempt to fudge, it’s the attempt to fudge and evade and obscure this essential component of peace; the removal of this basic obstacle to peace that is required and this is what the international community must face up to, once [the Palestinian leadership] says it, we will move inexorably towards peace."
