U.S.: Palestinians need not recognize Israel as Jewish state before talks

[IndianaGreen]

Last update - 05:32 19/04/2009

U.S.: Palestinians need not recognize Israel as Jewish state before talks

By Akiva Eldar

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people as a condition for renewing peace talks is unacceptable to the United States, the State Department said during special envoy George Mitchell's visits over the weekend to Ramallah and Cairo.

The State Department released statements saying that the United States would continue to promote a two-state solution. In Ramallah, Mitchell met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1079213.html

Related DU thread:

Israel's new PM says he will discuss a Palestinian state only if Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=124&topic_id=271559&mesg_id=271559

[Douglas Carpenter]

1. Even the Bush Administration understood the objections. Netanyahu is fishing for a deal breaker

"the Bush administration accepted the Palestinian objection that the issue should be subject to negotiation."

....

"A few weeks before Yasser Arafat died in 2004, he told Haaretz that he understood that Israel is a Jewish state. However, he said on a number of occasions that official recognition by the PLO of this fact would hurt the status and feelings of the Palestinian minority in Israel. He said it was not the Palestinians' business to define the identity of another country."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1079213.html

The Netanyahu/Lieberman government knows that if they can find the right or actually wrong wording to certain phrases they can torpedo any possibility for a peace settlement and thus continue unimpeded with their agenda of settlement expansion and consolidations of control over the West Bank so that a two-state solution becomes a flat-out physical implausibility.

[IndianaGreen]

3. The tactic has been to talk peace talks while building settlements

Every Israeli government has been guilty of that. I am surprised that Sharon was able to disengage from Gaza, but disengage he did. That's still a long shot from accepting Palestine right to exist as a sovereign nation.

[azurnoir]

4. Was it a disengagment or was it in reality a tradeoff ? n/t

[ProgressiveMuslim]

5. It probably already is a flat-out implausability.

It will be interesting to see how this progresses though. Obama might not be willing to play!

[Violet_Crumble]

2. I can feel the ghost of a very recent thread coming on...

Where's the direct link to where the State Department said that? I notice they haven't included it in the article. Have you got a link? I suspect much of this is lies. ;)

[grassfed]

6. Israel rejects two-state plan

Israel rejects two-state plan
Posted by Letters editor

Segregation not the answer

What have we come to? For peace, Israel's government demands that Palestinians must recognize Israel (population 20 percent Palestinian) as a Jewish state, a Jewish democracy <"Israel rejects U.S. plan for 2-state solution," News, April 17>. And Obama wants two states, one for Jews and another for Palestinians.

Did Martin Luther King Jr. demand two states, one white and another colored, living side-by-side in peace and security? Did President Lyndon Johnson demand that the civil-rights movement first recognize the United States as a white nation, a white democracy as a precondition for any talks?

Meanwhile, Israel declares first macaroni and then jars of honey a threat to the Jewish state and refuses this humanitarian aid to the blockaded and surrounded Palestinian reservation known as Gaza. I wonder if Native Americans recognize the situation from their history of genocidal treatment by the white settlers and their nation.

http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/northwestvoices/2009/04/19/israel_rejects_two-state_plan.html