Rather than demonstrating against Israel, the Palestinians should be directing
their anger over “Nakba Day” at the extremist Palestinian leadership that 64
years ago rejected any accommodation, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s
spokesman Mark Regev said on Tuesday.
Regev said the demonstrators should
ask themselves why they are not celebrating 64 years since the establishment of
a Palestinian state, in parallel to Israel’s celebration of its Independence Day
two weeks ago.
“The answer is clear,” he said.
“The Palestinian
leadership in 1947 and 1948 adopted an extremist and maximalist position. Unlike
the Jewish leadership, they rejected partition and refused to accept a Jewish
state even in truncated borders.”
The object of Palestinian anger should
not be Israel, he said, but rather the Palestinian leadership at the time which
“said ‘all or nothing,’ and in so doing betrayed the Palestinian
people.”
Regev said he would ask the demonstrators if the current
Palestinian leadership had learned the lessons of “extremist and maximalist”
positions.
“I would ask those demonstrators why the current Palestinian
leadership still has a problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Jewish state,”
he said.
“I would ask them if they are not repeating the same mistakes of
the extremist leadership from ‘47 and ’48.”