Ya'alon: EU boycott preferable to rockets on Ben-Gurion Airport

Defense minister says "wide-eyed and naïve people in the West" err in pressuring Israel that "peace must happen immediately."

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon (photo credit: Ariel Hermoni, Defense Ministry spokesman)
Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon
(photo credit: Ariel Hermoni, Defense Ministry spokesman)
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon on Monday said that if compromises in peace negotiations would lead to “rockets from Nablus, Ramallah and Jenin onto Ben-Gurion Airport, then I would rather have a European boycott” on Israel.
Ya’alon also addressed Sunday’s rocket attack from Lebanon, implying, despite Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s assigning responsibility to Lebanon and Hezbollah, that preliminary information indicated that the attack was perpetrated by Sunnis fighting Hezbollah in Syria who hoped to fool Israel into retaliating against Hezbollah.
Elaborating on his comments about rockets and boycotts, he said that wide-eyed and naïve people in the West and even some Israelis constantly press the state that “peace must happen immediately,” even though there are many life problems that take time to resolve and must be managed patiently.
Assailing the West as “paternalistic,” Ya’alon said that instead of them explaining to him, with all of his experience on the ground, how he misunderstands the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, we need “to explain to Europe why they’re wrong.”
He also complained that some in the West were what he considered obsessed with solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the solution to all problems in the Middle East, when really, he said, it is clear that “problems in Tunisia and Egypt have nothing to do with us.”
Regarding the Palestinians, he said “we don’t want to rule over them,” but said the focus should be helping them improve their “economy, government, institutions, courts, and most importantly education.”
Ya’alon added that he viewed the rise in “attacks by individuals” as resulting from “incitement by Palestinian leaders, their media and their education.”