Netanyahu cancels meeting with Gabriel
UK refuses to apologise
JERUSALEM, April 25, (Agencies): Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cancelled talks on Tuesday with German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel after the visiting diplomat declined to call off meetings with rights groups critical of Israel’s government, an official said.
The Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the meeting was cancelled after Gabriel decided to go ahead with talks with Israeli rights groups Breaking The Silence and B’Tselem.
Breaking The Silence seeks to document alleged Israeli military abuses in the Palestinian territories, while B’Tselem has worked on a range of issues and has strongly opposed Israeli settlement building.
Gabriel earlier told journalists in Ramallah, where he held talks with Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, that he had still hoped to meet Netanyahu and the rights groups.
He had also told German public television station ZDF that a decision to cancel the meeting would be “extremely regrettable.”
“It is completely normal that we speak with civil society representatives during a visit abroad,” he said.
Gabriel added that it would be “unthinkable” to cancel a meeting with Netanyahu if he met critics of the German government during a visit to Germany.
Earlier, Gabriel said it would be “regrettable” if Netanyahu called off a meeting between the two in Israel, as he threatened to do if the foreign minister met with an Israeli rights group .
Gabriel said it would be a “remarkable event, to put it mildly,” if Netanyahu cancelled their planned talks, arguing it was normal to talk to civil society representatives.
“Imagine if the Israeli Prime Minister ... came to Germany and wanted to meet people critical of the government and we said that is not possible ... That would be unthinkable,” he told Germany’s ZDF television.
A German foreign ministry spokeswoman had said the minister was due to meet civil society groups but declined to identify them.
Germany sees itself as one of Israel’s closest allies, but the legacy of the Holocaust means their ties are highly charged, and in recent years Berlin has been increasingly critical of Israel’s settlement plans.
Israeli media said Gabriel would meet with “Breaking the Silence,” a group that collects testimonies from Israeli veterans about the military’s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the influence it says Israeli settlers have on the army’s actions.
Gabriel
Unthinkable
Israeli Environment Minister Zeev Elkin, a confidante of Netanyahu, told Israel radio it was “unthinkable” for a minister to meet groups working against the country he was visiting. “The time has come for us to put an end to this situation in which anyone can come and meet groups that act against Israel ... you are entitled to meet whoever you want, but don’t expect that all the leaders of the state will stand in line to meet you,” he said.
In February, Netanyahu ordered the reprimand of the Belgian ambassador after Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel met with representatives of Breaking the Silence and B’tselem, another rights group, during his visit to the region.
Both organisations have become popular targets for right-wing politicians, who accuse them of damaging Israel’s reputation abroad and putting Israeli soldiers and officials at risk of prosecution.
Gabriel, a Social Democrat who has spoken publicly about a rift with his father, a convinced Nazi, is visiting the Middle East to press for a two-state solution to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
UK rejects Palestinians demand for apology:
Palestinian leaders said on Tuesday Britain had rejected their request for an apology for a 1917 declaration that helped pave the way to the state of Israel, and they would pursue international court action unless London backtracked.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called for the apology in an address to the UN General Assembly in September, but Britain plans to hold celebrations along with Israeli officials to mark the Nov 2 centenary of the Balfour Declaration.
“The answer came in a written letter to the (Palestinian) Foreign Ministry that the apology is refused,” Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian ambassador to Britain, told Voice of Palestine Radio on Tuesday.
“It means the Queen and the government of Britain will not apologise to the Palestinian people and the celebration marking 100 years since the Balfour promise will be held on time.” There was no immediate comment from Britain’s Foreign Office.
In the 1917 declaration, the British government said it viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. It also said “... nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine ...”
Palestine was under British rule when Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour made the policy statement in a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community.
Le Pen’s Holocaust denial ‘disturbing’:
Israel’s president on Monday denounced French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen’s recent comments denying France’s role in the Holocaust as “uniquely disturbing” and urged his country not to make “unholy alliances” with rising nationalist parties in Europe.
President Reuven Rivlin spoke at a ceremony marking Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day that was attended by former German President Joachim Gauck. He called on Israel to “wage a war against the current and dangerous wave of Holocaust denial” rising in Europe.
Le Pen drew condemnation from other presidential candidates and Israel’s Foreign Ministry when she suggested earlier this month that France wasn’t responsible for its role in rounding up French Jews for deportation to Nazi Germany’s death camps.
Mentioning the French election, Rivlin said a growing phenomenon in Europe of “renunciation of national responsibility in the name of alleged victimhood” was “a new, more destructive and dangerous kind” of Holocaust denial than previously witnessed.
Israel was founded three years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were slaughtered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. A large number of Holocaust survivors fled to the fledgling state in the immediate aftermath of the war, and an estimated 160,000 remain. Holocaust memorial day is one of Israel’s most solemn days, and is marked nationwide by memorial ceremonies and a siren that brings the country to a standstill.