Netanyahu's Foreign Policy Speech: Just Empty Talk

RAMALLAH, Jun 15 (IPS) - Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee, and a close confidant of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's foreign policy speech Sunday night as a big zero.

Abed Rabbo said the speech was empty of content, and pointless. "Netanyahu is a swindler…who makes up tricks about the achievement of peace," he was reported as saying by the Palestinian news agency Maan.

Abbas's spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeinah made a statement that, "Netanyahu's remarks have sabotaged all initiatives, paralysed all efforts being made, and challenge the Palestinian, Arab and American positions."

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who just last week told IPS that Palestinians were in their strongest position ever politically and that this time around the U.S. meant business, also lashed out at Netanyahu's speech.

Erekat said the Israeli premier's speech had "closed the door to permanent status negotiations. We ask the world not to be fooled by his use of the term Palestinian state because he qualified it," said Erekat.

"He declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, said refugees would not be negotiated and that settlements would remain. The peace process has been moving at the speed of a tortoise. Netanyahu has flipped it over on its back."

Erekat has gone as far as to call for annulment of the Arab peace initiative. The Arab initiative was a peace plan sponsored by the Saudis and adopted during the Arab League summit in Beirut in 2002. The plan called for normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world in return for Israel withdrawing form occupied Arab land and returning to its internationally recognised borders.

While the U.S. administration has hailed Netanyahu's reference to a Palestinian state, something he has refused to do since taking office in February, the pre-conditions for establishing this state and the kind of state it would be is very much in question.

Netanyahu only clambered on to the two-state solution bandwagon reluctantly and at the very last minute following intensive pressure.

This pressure came not only from U.S. President Barack Obama's administration, but from the EU, Israeli opposition figures and regional Arab leaders. Netanyahu also faces growing U.S.-Jewish criticism of his far-right policies.

However, critics from across the Palestinian and Israeli spectrums have dismissed Netanyahu's speech as aimed solely at placating Obama and offering nothing new apart from lip-service rhetoric towards the establishment of a Palestinian state.

"The ball is now in the Americans' court. It remains to be seen whether they will buy this faulty product Netanyahu is trying to sell them," said Samir Awad, political scientist at Birzeit University in the West Bank.

"Netanyahu, in a not very subtle way, basically undermines two of Obama's main demands. He refused to cease settlement expansion, and the kind of state he envisions would not be a truly independent state by international standards," Awad told IPS.

"Palestinians would have no control over their borders, natural resources or air space, besides being a demilitarised state," added Awad.

Netanyahu's refusal to cease settlement expansion means that returning Palestinian refugees, and ordinary Palestinian citizens, would not have full rights to the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Palestinian resources such as land and water continue to be expropriated for the benefit of the 500,000 Israeli settlers who live there and in East Jerusalem illegally according to international law.

The Geneva Convention prohibits the transfer of civilian populations into occupied territory.