EU urges new Israeli govt to accept Palestinian state

BRUSSELS/GAZA STRIP: The European Commission pledged on Friday to support the new Israeli government as long as it accepts certain benchmarks, including the principle of an autonomous Palestinian state.

“The European Commission is looking forward to working with the new Israeli government in pursuit of a common agenda,” the EU executive’s head Jose Manuel Barroso said in a message to Israeli premier-designate Benjamin Netanyahu.

“It stands ready to assist and support you in your search for peace, prosperity and security for the people in Israel and the region, based on the vision of two states living side by side in peace and prosperity,” he said.

Netanyahu, from the right-wing Likud party, plans to present his new government to parliament next week, following the Labour party’s decision to join his coalition, which includes other right-wing and religious formations.

The United States has warned that peace efforts, which have barely budged in recent years, will not be any easier under the hard-line Netanyahu, who opposes the creation of a Palestinian state.

Barroso’s spokesman noted: “There are certain benchmarks that we would like to see followed in this relationship.”

Another commission spokesman, Amadeu Altafaj Tardio, said that EU foreign ministers would be discussing developments in Israel and the fallout of its war on the militant Palestinian Hamas movement holding the Gaza Strip.

“There is a new administration, there is a new prime minister, and this has to be considered. Let’s see what the intentions of the future government are going to be on a number of issues,” he told reporters.

“One of them is (humanitarian aid) access to Gaza. Restrictions are still there, and we will have to see what is the policy of the new administration.”

The Europeans are the biggest donors of aid to the Palestinians but they hold little sway over Israel, which is backed firmly by the United States.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul, on a visit to Brussels, said he hoped that the new government would tone down the rhetoric that its parties have used while they were in opposition.

Meanwhile, Palestinian legislator MP Dr. Yahya Mousa of the Hamas’s parliamentary bloc in the PLC has asserted that the Arab reaction towards the Israeli violation of Arab sovereignty is feeble and shameful. Mousa was apparently reacting to Israeli news reports suggesting that Israeli and American war planes violated the Sudanese sovereignty and bombed human convoy east of the country sometimes in January and February, killing at least 800 people.

“Although there is no independent sources that could confirm authenticity of those reports, yet if the news came from an Israeli source, then it is clear that the Zionist entity exposes its ugly face, arrogance, piracy, and terrorism that it committed in the Arab region purposely to show that it was capable of disciplining the Arab world”, Mousa said in an interview on Friday.

Mousa blamed the international community for dealing softly with the Hebrew state, which, he added, gave her the wrong signal to consider itself as a state above the international law. “This is not the first time the Hebrew state bragged of hitting an Arab state, but it is sad to say that the official Arab stand towards those violations were senseless”, he underlined.

In 1981, Israeli war planes hit the Iraqi nuclear reactor after they flew over Jordan, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Another Israeli violation was recorded two years ago, when Israeli war planes hit suspected Syrian nuclear site, south of the capital Damascus.

The Egyptian Al-Shoroq newspaper quoted Sudanese sources without naming them as saying that American warplanes had participated in raid on the convoy that left hundreds dead, including Somalis, Ethiopians, Eritrean, and Sudanese. The US embassy in Sudan refused to comment on those reports.