Benjamin Netanyahu Plots Unilateral Changes to Status Quo
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will reportedly consult with advisers on alternative options to change the Israeli-Palestinian status quo in the West Bank.
Netanyahu’s shift, reported by Haaretz, came as Secretary of State John Kerry met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Wednesday in London regarding the possibility of restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which were suspended last month. Agence France-Presse reported that the meeting ended with little progress.
A State Department official told AFP that according to Kerry, “while the door remains open to peace, it is up to the parties to determine whether they are willing to take the steps necessary to resume negotiations.”
When Israel entered the latest round of negotiations last year, Netanyahu cited the need to prevent Israel from becoming a binational Jewish-Palestinian state. He repeated those sentiments in an interview with Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun during a trip to Japan this week.
“I don’t think the status quo is desirable,” Netanyahu said in an interview with the Japanese newspaper, according to Haaretz. “I don’t want it and I’m engaging in consultations with my own coalition partners and with others, to see if we have other alternatives, because I think the status quo is not a good idea, because I don’t want a binational state.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO