Netanyahu: Peace is possible
WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told U.S. supporters on Tuesday he is prepared to make peace with the Palestinians if they recognize Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.
Addressing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas by name from the podium of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual Washington conference, Netanyahu said he expects peace to create “open and thriving relations” with the Arab world. The speech came a day after President Barack Obama pressed him to compromise with the Palestinians.
“I am prepared to make a historic peace with our Palestinian neighbors,” Netanyahu said, calling on Abbas to recognize the Jewish state. “No excuses, no delays; it’s time.”
Netanyahu spent more than half of his annual AIPAC address on Iran, which he said was on the wrong side of the world’s “moral divide” and not to be trusted.
Netanyahu is in Wash- ington as a deadline looms on Secretary of State John Kerry’s nine-month Middle East peace campaign. Kerry is pressing Abbas and Netanyahu to accept by April 29 a structure that would guide further negotiations, a message reinforced by Obama when he met with the Israeli leader Monday at the White House.
Obama is inserting himself more directly into the peace talks as Kerry hits resistance. Abbas has been invited for his own White House meeting on March 17. A week later, Obama is scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia, which has leverage over the Palestinians.
For Israel, the most pressing concern is Iran’s nuclear program.
Iran should face more intense pressure during international negotiations and not be given further respite from sanctions, Netanyahu said, adding: “You know how you get that agreement from Iran? Not by relieving pressure but by adding pressure.”
He suggested that the administration and its negotiating partners including Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany had been duped by Tehran, including “its smiling presi- dent and its smooth-talking foreign minister.”
“But if you listen to their words, their soothing words,” he said, “they don’t square with Iran’s aggressive actions.”
In particular, Netanyahu warned against any longterm deal that would allow Iran to retain the ability to enrich uranium. Officials from the U.S. and their negotiating partners have indicated that enrichment kept to a low level that does not permit weapons development is likely to be part of a final agreement that they say would prevent Iran from ever developing a nuclear weapon.
In a pledge that signaled both a willingness to strike Iran’s nuclear sites as a last resort and a refusal to yield on core peace terms with the Palestinians, Netanyahu told a cheering audience: “I will do whatever I must to defend the Jewish state of Israel.”
Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons. Israel, which unlike Iran has not signed the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, is widely believed to have the region’s sole atomic arsenal.