Israel says Palestinian statehood is not a “realistic position”

Wanting to establish a Palestinian state is not “today” a “realistic” project, declared on Monday the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Saar, while the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, reiterated his attachment to Palestinian “sovereignty”.

During a press conference in Jerusalem, the new head of Israeli diplomacy was asked about the prospect of a revival of the so-called Abraham Accords with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States and the possibility of normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state.

“In a word? No,” replied Mr. Saar.

“A Palestinian state (…) will be a Hamas state,” he added. “I don't think that this position is realistic today, and we have to be realistic.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during a swearing-in ceremony for newly appointed ministers on March 31, 2024 in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank © AFP – Jaafar ASHTIYEH

The Abraham Accords, promoted by Mr. Trump during his first term, had led to normalization between Israel and several Arab countries, namely Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.

Commemorating the 20th anniversary of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas instead advocated a fully sovereign Palestinian state.

“We are committed to peace and we will continue to work to achieve it,” the president of the Palestinian Authority said in a speech reported by the national agency Wafa.

“Security and stability can only be achieved by eliminating the occupation and achieving sovereignty and independence in the territory of the Palestinian state,” he said.

– Sovereign –

An extraordinary summit of members of the Arab League, a pan-Arab organization bringing together 22 countries, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), an organization Pan-Islamic conference bringing together more than 50 Muslim states, opened Monday in Riyadh.

According to the official Saudi news agency SPA, the participants were to discuss “the continued Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.”

Riyadh is calling for a new “international alliance” aimed at encouraging the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

In front of the press, Mr. Saar referred to the Oslo peace process, which began in the 1990s and was opposed by the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, whose bloody attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, triggered the current war.

This process and the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 “not only (…) have not brought peace, but as we “We have seen it, have degraded our security,” the minister said.

Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007, after the Israeli withdrawal, and “we don't want that to happen in Judea and Samaria” (the name that Israelis give to the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967), he added.

For his first press conference since taking office a few days ago, Mr. Saar considered it “important” to recall that unlike the UN, Israel does not consider “Judea and Samaria” “as occupied territories, but as disputed territories.”

Several hundred thousand Jewish settlers live there among three million Palestinians.

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