Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu slammed Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday for speaking in Cairo with Hamas’s leaders and trying
to push forward Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.
“Abu Mazen [Abbas] is
embracing the head of a terrorist organization that just last month said Israel
needed to be wiped off the map,” Netanyahu said. “This is not the way someone
behaves who is interested in peace.”
This is the second day in a row that
Netanyahu has related to the talks, saying on Wednesday that Abbas was
considering unity with an organization that “wants to destroy Israel, and fired
rockets on our cities. We know that any territory we evacuate will be taken over
by Hamas and Iran. We won’t let that happen.”
Tzipi Livni, head of the
new party bearing her name, issued a response to Netanyahu’s Thursday statement,
saying that instead of “reprimanding Abu Mazen in order to convince the Israeli
public on the eve of elections that there is no hope for peace, Israel should
justifiably demand that any internal Palestinian arrangement include recognition
of Israel and an end to violence and terrorism.”
Livni, when she was
foreign minister, was instrumental in getting the Quartet to set three
conditions for engagement with Hamas: recognition of Israel, forswearing of
terrorism and acceptance of previous Israel-Palestinian agreements.
One
government official said Netanyahu’s comments about the Fatah-Hamas
reconciliation efforts reflected concern in Jerusalem that – although a long
shot – such moves could bear fruit.
“We are trying to draw a line in the
sand and let it be known that this is unacceptable,” he said. “You can’t profess
to want peace, yet at the same time embrace people who want to wipe us off the
map.”
Asked whether Israel was trying to convince third parties – such as
the US and some European countries – to use their leverage to dissuade the
Palestinians from the move, the official said, “Our position on this matter is
well known.”
If Hamas and Fatah do reconcile, the official said that such
a scenario “changes the constellation in a negative way, and will have
consequences on the way we deal with Abbas.”
While the official would not
elaborate on what steps Israel would take in return, he said that in 2006, after
Hamas won the elections in the PA, Israel cut off all economic cooperation,
including the monthly transfer of duties collected on the PA’s behalf.