The EU should be cautious to avoid being perceived as lecturing Israel on the
settlement issue, Latvian Foreign Minister Edgar Rinkevics said Tuesday in a
somewhat unusual public comment by a senior European diplomat.
“There is
concern about the settlement issue, and I raised this issue yesterday,”
Rinkevics told The Jerusalem Post, referring to a meeting he had Monday with
Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman.
Then, in a rare admission, he added,
“It is very difficult for people who are not really experts in the region, first
of all. Second, [it is very difficult] taking into account the absolutely
complex situation historically, politically and legally, to start kind of
lecturing any other country, because what we see here is a very complex
situation.”
Rinkevics made clear that he was not breaking ranks with the
EU’s censure over Israel’s settlement policy, articulated most recently by EU
foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton two weeks ago when she condemned a plan to
build some 800 new housing units in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood, beyond the
pre-1967 lines. He said he hoped the EU’s concerns “will be heard
here.”
He said, however, that while the EU was “expressing our views on
how we see the situation,” he didn’t want this to be “perceived as
lecturing.”
Rinkevics explained that “sometimes Latvians get irritated
because they perceive some communication from Brussels and the EU as
lecturing.”
The Latvian foreign minister – making his second trip to
Israel, but the first visit to the country by a Latvian foreign minister since
2007 – arrived Monday and in addition to meeting Liberman, met President Shimon
Peres and National Security Council head Yaakov Amidror. On Wednesday he will be
going to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and
PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
Rinkevics said he will reiterate to the
PA leadership that the EU’s position on their likely UN bid next month to gain
non-state observer status is that doing so “will not help the overall
process.”
“We very much hope [to see] direct negotiations between the
Palestinian Authority and Israel, and no unilateral moves,” he said. “That is
the position that has been repeated by many of my colleagues, by Lady Ashton
when she was here last week, the same message. I think it is important
that it is being delivered by big and small members of the EU.”
The
Latvian foreign minister was non-committal regarding what the EU would do if the
PA ignored this advice and went ahead with their plans, saying that the EU
foreign ministers were set to formally discuss the issue at their next meeting
in mid-November.
He said that the hope was that the EU could come to a
united position on the issue, something – given recent history – that does not
seem likely.
Last November the EU split in the UNESCO vote on admitting
Palestine as a state, with five countries voting against the move, 11 for and 11
abstaining. Latvia cast one of the abstentions.
The Latvian vote,
Rinkevics said, was “a clear sign that if we cannot forge a united stand, then
we wanted to symbolically underline our disappointment that we did not have a
common EU stance.”