FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected a return to violence in an address to the PLO.
“What is required of us ... a return to violence? I won’t accept it,” he reportedly said Tuesday at a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council in Ramallah.
Abbas also said that Israel must halt all settlement building and recognize a Palestinian state in pre-1967 borders to resume peace talks.
“When Israel stops settlement activity for a specific period and when it recognizes the borders we are calling for, and these are the legal borders, there would be nothing to prevent us from going to negotiations to complete what we agreed to at Annapolis,” Abbas said, according to Reuters.
The Annapolis conference in 2007 restarted Israel-Palestinian peace talks and called for the first time for a two-state solution, following the guidelines of the 2002 “road map” for peace that called for a settlement freeze and an end to Palestinian violence.
The PLO council was holding a two-day meeting to discuss extending Abbas’ presidential term, which expires Jan. 25. Palestinian elections scheduled for next month were canceled when Hamas refused to allow the vote to go forward in Gaza.
Abbas, 74, has said he will not run for re-election.
Freeze Inspectors, Settlers Clash in West Bank
A border guard and 11 settlers were injured when Civil Administration inspectors attempted to reinforce the construction freeze in a West Bank settlement.
A clash broke out between residents of Tzofim and police when the inspectors attempted to enter the settlement to remove building equipment that they said was being used in violation of the 10-month freeze.
Tzofim is located about two miles east of the Green Line, north of the Palestinian town of Kalkilya and near the central Israeli city of Kfar Saba.
About 60 teens tried to block the inspectors from entering the settlement by laying rocks in the road. Construction workers and residents tried to stop the inspectors from confiscating the equipment.
It was the first such incident in eight days.
Jews Can Live Anywhere in Israel, Deputy PM Tells ZOA
Israel’s deputy prime minister said Israel will “not compromise on the right of Jews to live in any part of Eretz Yisrael.”
“We do not accept that Arabs can live anywhere, whereas Jews may not live in some parts of Eretz Yisrael,” Moshe Yaalon told a crowd of 700 at the Zionist Organization of America’s annual dinner Sunday in New York.
Also speaking at the dinner was U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the minority whip of the House of Representatives. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered brief remarks by videotape.
“We must answer our enemies’ dangerous resurgence with renewed vigilance, lest we invite greater dangers for both Israel and the United States,” Cantor said. He added that “too many American Jews have become desensitized to the fires that threaten the Jews of Israel and of Europe.”
“Israel’s security is synonymous with our own,” Cantor said. “Her enemies are our enemies—and polite silence amounts to complicity in our own demise.”
Netanyahu lauded the evening’s honoree, philanthropist and Las Vegas Sands Corp. CEO Sheldon Adelson, as “the most committed Zionist I have ever known” and praised the ZOA as an organization that “refuses to compromise on the truth regardless of prevailing fashion and no matter what the costs may be.”
Yaalon was booed briefly when he spoke about Israel’s 10-month settlement freeze by what ZOA President Morton Klein described as a handful of people.