JERUSALEM, (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced support yesterday for the first time for Palestinians to establish a contiguous state, saying their future country should not look like “Swiss cheese”.
But only hours earlier, a ministerial committee in his right-wing government granted Israeli legal status to three previously unauthorised Jewish settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank, drawing Palestinian and international criticism.
Palestinians fear such outposts and the 130 formal settlements Israel has built in the territory it captured in a 1967 war will deny them a viable state.
Asked on CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront programme whether he would accept the Palestinians’ belief they should have a country that is contiguous, Netanyahu replied: “Yes.”
“Not as a Swiss cheese? No,” Netanyahu added, addressing a key Palestinian concern, that the state they seek would be comprised of pockets of villages and towns surrounded by Israeli settlements.
Netanyahu previously has said Israel would be “generous about the size” of a future Palestinian state, but he has not echoed U.S. President Barack Obama’s call for a contiguous country to emerge from Middle East peace talks – frozen since 2010 over the settlement issue
His change of tone on the nature of a Palestinian state came a week after he received a letter from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that repeated a call for an end to all
activity and put the onus on Israel to take action to get peace talks moving again.
Palestinians are awaiting a formal response to the letter.
In a statement before the CNN interview, Netanyahu’s office said the ministerial panel “decided to formalise the status of the three communities … which were established in the 1990s following the decisions of past governments”.
Most of the international community views all Jewish settlements in the West Bank as illegal. Israel distinguishes between settlements it has approved and outposts which were never granted official authorisation.
Some 350 settlers live in the outposts whose status was changed — Bruchin and Rechelim, both in the northern part of the West Bank and Sansana to the south.
