Kadima faults PM’s policies for bringing PA statehood bid

“The Netanyahu government’s passiveness has brought on the activeness against Israel,” party spokesman says.

By LAHAV HARKOV
Opposition leader Tzipi Livni 311 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Opposition leader Tzipi Livni 311
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Kadima blamed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s policies for leading the Palestinian Authority to officially seek recognition of statehood from the UN on Thursday.
“The Netanyahu government’s passiveness has brought on the activeness against Israel,” a Kadima spokesman said. “The inability of the two sides to continue the negotiations that Kadima led brought this bad result to Israel.”
He added: “Instead of a Palestinian state being established through an arrangement with Israel, as Kadima offered, the world will recognize a Palestinian state against Israel’s will.”
“The Netanyahu government has brought unprecedented isolation to Israel and an echoing diplomatic failure,” said the spokesman. “Netanyahu made a historical mistake when he refused to continue negotiations.
He uses strong words, but Israel is only getting weaker.”
Kadima MK Yohanan Plesner was responsible for compiling a report on the statehood bid; the document was rejected by the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last month.
“This is further proof of the diplomatic avalanche that we are experiencing in recent days,” Plesner said. “As the crises with Turkey and the US government are only getting stronger, the Palestinian bid in the UN is opening another front in which Israel’s stature and honor are being trampled.”
MK Daniel Ben-Simon (Labor) said: “Israel is making a mistake in its unwillingness to recognize a Palestinian state – it is an Israeli interest as much as it is a Palestinian interest. After the world recognizes a Palestinian state, the government must not stand in its way, and start talks with the new state in order to have full relations with our neighbor.”
MK Ya’acov Katz (National Union) also reacted to the statehood bid, saying that, if he ran Israel, he would do the following: “Forbid all members of the so-called Palestinian Authority from going abroad, lock [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas in the Mukata [Abbas’s presidential compound in Ramallah], as [prime minister Ariel] Sharon did to the chief terrorist Arafat, and apply Israeli sovereignty to all Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria.”
Katz said he would “announce a five-year plan to increase the Jewish population over the socalled Green Line, including the eastern part of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.”