Word: netanyahu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Arab capitals the results were greeted with varying degrees of indifference, dismay, anxiety, bitterness, resignation. "We don't differentiate between Peres and Netanyahu," said Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, noting that "a few weeks ago, it was Peres who was bombing civilians in Lebanon." But Netanyahu's ascendance was grim news to most Arabs. "We in the Middle East are in trouble," said Nawaf Salam, a law lecturer at the American University of Beirut. "Only Peres was willing to offer something the Arabs could accept. With him, Israel had a real possibility of reconciliation with the region. Now all this...
Although the Oslo accords require him to do so, Netanyahu says he will refuse to talk to the Palestinians about the future of Jerusalem. He so vituperatively--and unfairly--accused Peres of threatening to divide Jerusalem that he has cut off any maneuvering room. He also pledges to close down Orient House, the P.L.O. headquarters in East Jerusalem, even though the Labor government gave a written assurance, as a secret adjunct to the first Oslo accord, that the office could continue functioning...
Mindful of the importance of "facts on the ground," the incoming Prime Minister vowed to lift four-year-old Labor-government restrictions on new or expanded Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When exit surveys finally began to indicate a Netanyahu victory on election night, Yaakov Katz, chairman of the settlers' offshore radio station, whooped, "Everything will change! In 10 years there will be half a million Jews in Judea and Samaria," the biblical name for the West Bank. Settlement expansion is the most incendiary issue among the Palestinians, who view the settlers as robbers...
...Palestinians, Netanyahu promised, will never have a state of their own. Negotiations will go forward, but all he says he will offer the Palestinians is a "very generous" autonomy deal: freedom to run their own internal affairs, with the exception of foreign policy and overall security. The Palestinians already have that. The principle of the Oslo accords was that the autonomy period would be a five-year transition to greater self-determination. Netanyahu wants to freeze things as they are, though that would squash the most minimal of Palestinian aspirations...
...short term, Palestinians are reacting calmly, but over time their response to an unbending Netanyahu could flare up into a new intifadeh, the six-year stones-and-guns uprising that finally forced Israel to negotiate with them. The new Prime Minister claims that Arab leaders will simply lower their expectations when confronted by in-your-face showdowns. Instead he might drive despairing Palestinians, who have profited even less than Israelis by the peace process so far, into battle. It is a possibility that Benny Begin, Menachem's son and another hardheaded prospect for the Likud government, concedes is real...