Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely met on Monday with the EU Ambassador to Israel Emanuele Giaufret and demanded Europe to denounce the speech made by Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, in which he said that “Israel is a colonial project of the Europeans.”
"The European Union must condemn Abu Mazen's statement that Israel is a colonial project of the Europeans," said Hotovely. “Abu Mazen's serious words in his speech yesterday, which are a combination of lies and condemnation of the American administration, deserve harsh criticism.”
"The Palestinians cannot continue to fund terror and look for an embrace and support from the Europeans, through demands for unilateral recognition," Hotovely stressed.
"The European Union must act fairly towards Israel in its actions in the region and understand that it is the Palestinians who perpetuate the conflict through the use of UNRWA and their refusal to come to the negotiating table," she continued.
“What we heard yesterday from Mahmoud Abbas was terrible. He went back to the ideas he expressed decades ago, when they were no less terrible,” President Reuven Rivlin told a visiting delegation from the American pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. “To say Israel is the result of a Western conspiracy to settle Jews in land belonging to Arab populations? To say that the Jewish people has no connection with the land of Israel?,” disregards the progress made in the Palestinian speech throughout history, said Rivlin.
Yossi Beilin, a senior figure in Israel's Labor Party, said that Abbas "has the power to announce that the Palestinians are ready to give up on the two-state solution, and that all they demand is to be part of Israel, as equal citizens. But instead of shocking us he would rather trick us and make us deal with explanations to his cursing.”
Israeli security bodies pause the main question: Would Abu Mazen, as his term approaches its end, hint on the organization and allow the return of armed resistance, as late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat did? Until this moment, experts and followers of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle believe that the Palestinian president doesn’t wish to do so.
