Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to support a two-state solution but the Palestinian government refuses to come to the table to negotiate, a spokesman said Thursday.
Speaking on CNN, David Keyes, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said the prime minister wants peace and even stopped the building of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. However, that hasn’t been enough for Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas.
“President Abbas didn’t take that too seriously and that’s because the issue isn’t the settlements or the presence of Jews,” Keyes said.
He added, “The conflict is not about the creation of a Palestinian state. It’s about the existence of a Jewish state.”
Keyes said Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech on Wednesday dealt with tangential issues to peace, namely Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, he wasn’t getting to the core issue of Palestinians refusing to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.
Kerry’s speech was widely panned and described as a eulogy for the two-state solution in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He spoke for 70 minutes on the topic and offered several principles that he said were necessary for peace to take place.
However, after he was finished, the speech was met with derision by Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Netanyahu took to Israeli TV to tell Kerry he was placing too much blame on Israel for the failure of peace in the region.
“Instead of focusing on the actual barriers to peace, this has done a bait and switch,” Keyes said.
