Israel/Palestine

International efforts to broker deal doomed to fail due to ‘all or nothing’ approach to two-state solution, president says

President Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday told members of the European Parliament that international efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement — including the current French initiative — were “negotiations for negotiations’ sake,” and therefore doomed to fail.

His criticism of Paris’s efforts to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table joined a growing chorus of scorn from senior Israeli officials. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has derided the French proposal, and a senior Israeli official this week said the EU’s efforts smacked of colonialism.

“The French initiative suffers from fundamental faults. The attempt to return to negotiations for negotiations’ sake, not only does not bring us near the long-awaited solution, but rather drags us further away from it,” the head of state said in an address in Brussels.

Like other international initiatives to reach a peace agreement, Rivlin said the French plan’s inflexible “all or nothing” approach to the implementation of a two-state solution ignores the total lack of trust between Israelis and Palestinians.