The former chief of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, Shabtai Shavit, has said that Israel does not want peace and that, if it had, it would have made peace with the Palestinian Authority (PA) long ago.
Shavit gave his remarks to Israeli daily Maariv, reiterating that if Israel wanted peace it would have discussed it in economic and infrastructure terms that serve the interests of both parties, Arab 48 reported yesterday.
Comments made by former head of the Mossad Shabtai Shavit – that people who vote for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are “ignorant” – set off a firestorm of condemnation from the political Right, including from Netanyahu himself. https://t.co/sIP4cdwkDS
— Mats ☮ Nilsson (@mazzenilsson) June 20, 2019
However, Shavit said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not see the PA as a negotiating partner and therefore refuses to develop relations with the authority.
He asked:
“Do you know any other head of an Israeli government who did not talk with the Palestinians?”
“There’s no limit to the arrogance of the Left,” Netanyahu said after Shabtai Shavit called PM’s voters people “without understanding.”https://t.co/EarCRUaIWy
— World Israel News (@worldisraelnews) June 20, 2019
Shavit also claimed that Netanyahu stopped speaking to the PA under pressure from the Israeli right-wing, who he claimed “would lynch him in the city center” if he opened discussions today.
“We [Israel] are the strongest in the Middle East”, Shavit continued, adding that:
“At this time no Arab coalition is likely to be formed that would endanger [Israel’s] existence like in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Since the Oslo accords, israel has just paid lip service to Palestinian statehood — in practice, expansion & annexation was the end game https://t.co/ZfadtPuaqI
— Sarah Wilkinson (@swilkinsonbc) June 22, 2019
Regarding the Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s – the last substantial attempt at peace negotiations – Shavit said that the Israeli right-wing has since painted this agreement as a “sin,” arguing that had they continued down this path, there could have been peace.
(Middle East Monitor, PC, Social Media)
