U.S. lambastes Netanyahu over claim
The Israeli leader said settlement opponents support ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Jews.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has denounced new comments by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which he said critics of Israel’s settlement expansion in the West Bank are advocating the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews.
Using unusually forceful language to criticize a longstanding ally, the State Department said Friday that it was protesting Netanyahu’s comments directly to his government. It was not clear whether U.S. officials believe Netanyahu was referring to them in the comments.
The U.S. has long condemned Israel’s aggressive building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, contested land that the Palestinians want for an eventual state.
Netanyahu said that just as Israel has nearly 2 million Arabs living in the country, so should Palestinians tolerate Jews living in their midst.
“Yet the Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with one precondition: no Jews,” Netanyahu said in a video he posted on Facebook. “There’s a phrase for that. It’s called ethnic cleansing.”
He added that he had “always been perplexed” that critics viewed settlements as an obstacle to peace.
The response in Israel to the video and to the U.S. criticism was muted because the news broke in the middle of the Jewish Sabbath.
Neither the prime minister nor his spokespeople responded Saturday to the State Department’s remarks. But a settler leader, Oded Revivi, accused the Obama administration of having an “obsession” with criticizing the Israeli settlements.
“The demand to uproot hundreds of thousands of Jews and only Jews from our ancestral homeland would constitute ethnic cleansing and would be unacceptable anywhere else on earth,” Revivi said in an email.
Opposition lawmaker Tzipi Livni, a former foreign minister, said Netanyahu’s message was aimed primarily at his own right-wing constituency and Republicans in the U.S. who support the settlements. But she said at a forum Saturday, “This video hurt the state of Israel and its relations with the U.S.”
Netanyahu’s remarks drew the ire of Ayman Odeh, leader of an Israeli party representing the Arab minority.
“He is equating the Arab minority that lives in the state — a minority that has lived here for generations — to the settlers, who were brought in violation of international law to occupied territory,” Odeh said. “Netanyahu has the chutzpah to use the word ‘ethnic cleansing’ when it was the settlements that were established to brutally push the Palestinians into a limited territory and to bring about the de facto annexation of the West Bank.”
In an interview with Israel Radio, Yoav Kisch, a legislator from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, defended the prime minister’s reference to ethnic cleansing as a way to expose hypocrisy.
Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War, areas that the Palestinians claim for their state. Since then, Israel has built more than 100 settlements in the West Bank for about 400,000 Jews. Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal.
Palestinians have demanded a halt to settlement construction as a condition of resuming peace talks, which have been essentially stalled for years. Although many Israelis and Palestinians continue to favor a “two-state solution” — an independent Israel and an independent Palestine living side by side — there seems to be little or no political will these days for pursuing an agreement.
Palestinians believe the settlements, scattered all over the West Bank, prevent a geographically coherent state.
Asked about Netanyahu’s video, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau cited broad international consensus that regards settlements as an “obstacle to peace.”
“We obviously strongly disagree with the characterization that those who oppose settlement activity or view it as an obstacle to peace are somehow calling for ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank,” Trudeau said. “We believe that using that type of terminology is inappropriate and unhelpful.”
She criticized what she called Israel’s “dramatic escalation” of the demolition of Palestinian homes and structures, leaving hundreds without shelter. Israel has also retroactively “legalized” unauthorized remote settler outposts and seized additional West Bank land for exclusive Israeli use, she said. “We have repeatedly expressed our strong concerns that trends on the ground continue to move in the opposite direction” of a two-state solution.
There has been speculation in Washington that President Obama may instruct Secretary of State John F. Kerry to make one last attempt to find an Israeli-Palestinian accord before the administration leaves office. tracy.wilkinson @latimes.com Times staff writer Wilkinson reported from Washington and special correspondent Mitnick from Tel Aviv.