Word: netanyahu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...swearing-in ceremony, Netanyahu's Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, sent aggressive signals, renouncing some of the relatively dovish positions of outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - whose government spent its final year in office negotiating indirectly with Syria and directly with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Lieberman rejected the Bush Administration's Annapolis peace initiative, under which Olmert and Abbas had talked about the parameters of a Palestinian state. And he insisted that Israel would never withdraw from the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967. "Whoever thinks that he will achieve something by way of concessions - no, he will only...
...sounds more than a little fanciful to imagine Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signing a historic peace agreement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on the White House lawn, with President Barack Obama looking on. Taken at face value, Israel's new hard-line government is not exactly campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize...
Despite his hard-line inflammatory rhetoric, however, Lieberman may be a pragmatist. Unlike many on Israel's right - including Netanyahu - Lieberman supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a Ha'aretz interview after taking office, Lieberman said Israel should abide by the 2002 Roadmap, which calls for a Palestinian state. The Roadmap obliges the Palestinians to cease violence, dismantle the capabilities of terrorist organizations and reform their political institutions before any movement toward the creation of a Palestinian state. But it also obliges Israel to freeze settlement construction and dismantle all settlement outposts built since March...
...Still, Netanyahu ignores the Palestinians at his peril; Hamas is rearming itself in Gaza for a new round of fighting, and there are rumblings of another intifadeh, or uprising, breaking out in the West Bank. And a wider peace with Arab nations will depend on Israel's letting the Palestinians have a state. In his farewell speech, outgoing Premier Olmert warned, "There is no state of Israel without a solid Jewish majority, and there is no Jewish majority in Greater Israel [including the West Bank], which is home to millions of Palestinians." Olmert lacked the courage and the political backing...
...Aviv Wednesday morning. "Nobody saw this coming," said Mark Burnes, a State Department analyst who monitors Syrian affairs. "We knew that they were close to a deal, but the Israelis didn't tell us how close."... Official sources say that earlier that same morning, [Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu] had himself embarked upon an epoch-making visit to Syria, touching down in Damascus International Airport only six minutes after President al-Assad arrived in Tel Aviv...." [April Fools!] (Read about the top 10 April Fools' pranks in history...