Without closing the door on the possibility of
future negotiations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday
reiterated his oft-stated stance that, under the current circumstances,
Israel could not make peace with the Palestinians. In
a pre-election interview with Channel 2 News, Netanyahu said that if
Israel were to pull out of the West Bank, it would fall into the hands
of the country’s enemies.
“In the Middle East, the real Middle East, any
territory that we evacuate will be captured by Iran,” the prime
minister said. “The stronger we are, the more we will be able to
guarantee our future and make peace with our neighbors.”
In a reference to Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas, he added: “I’ll make peace if my interlocutor
is someone who doesn’t embrace Hamas and doesn’t greet with plaudits the
people who rained rockets on the country.”
The PA president last week met with the political leader of Hamas in the latest attempt at reconciliation with the rival Islamist faction.
Still, Netanyahu said, “if Abbas is willing to negotiate without preconditions, he’ll find me at the other end of the table.”
Asked about Iran, and specifically about
whether there was any daylight between the respective strategies of
Israel and the US vis-à-vis the specter of an atomic bomb in the hands
of the ayatollahs, Netanyahu said: “I sincerely hope that
internationally imposed sanctions, which are a large part of the
deterrence, will continue. President Obama has said that Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself.”
The prime minister reiterated previous
evocations of World War II, and especially the Holocaust, as a
historical precedent that should figure in international policy on Iran.
“I don’t want to be in the same situation that
the Jewish people were in 70 years ago,” he said. “Then, we had to beg
for protection. We will have the ability to defend ourselves from any
threat, and that’s why I’m proud of the manner in which we’ve bolstered
our [military] might.”
Netanyahu dismissed suggestions that Israel’s 2012 budget deficit, which was recently revealed
to have been twice as large as the goal, would force the next
government to levy heavier taxes on the population after the January 22
elections. Netanyahu’s Likud-Beytenu list is widely touted as a shoo-in
for largest party and coalition-maker.
“It doesn’t seem to me that we’ll have to do
that, because we took it all into account,” he said, and went on to
speculate regarding possible sources of increased government revenue
that could obviate the need to raise the tax burden. “Maybe the markets
will recover and there’ll be an increase in exports. The deficit,
percentage-wise, was larger in 2009, so we cut down on many expenses.
That didn’t keep us from instating free education from age 3, free
dental care, and a rise in the minimum wage.”
In fact, Netanyahu pledged, 2013 would see an increase in government expenditure.
“We have to think about what we raise more and
what we raise to a lesser extent,” he said. “In order to build up our
economy, we created jobs, so that the unemployment rate in Israel is now
among the lowest in the West. I don’t want to raise taxes; it goes
against my natural inclination, and I’ll do whatever I can to avoid it.”
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