Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have more trouble on a domestic level than because of the Palestinians when it comes to reaching an agreement being brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia for normalization of relations, Israeli Ambassador Ido Aharoni told Newsmax Friday after Netanyahu's speech to the United Nations.
"The Palestinians are in no position to derail talks between the United States and Saudi Arabia," Aharoni said on Newsmax's "National Report." "The reason I say that is because they ruled themselves out by declining compromises that were offered to them by [Bill] Clinton and the George W. Bush administration in 2008."
Instead, the question is whether Netanyahu's current coalition will be able to support and endorse the normalization deal, because "the government is pretty much left out of that cycle of negotiations," said Aharoni.
Further, conservative members of Israel's parliament have already announced they will "oppose any concession regarding the Palestinians, even if it is a symbolic, not to mention the big hot potato, which is will Israel be supportive of the idea of allowing Saudi Arabia to have a nuclear reactor, which is really the big issue on the table," he said.
During his speech, Netanyahu said he believes that "we are at the cusp" of "historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia."
"Just as we achieved the Abraham Accords with the leadership of President [Donald] Trump, I believe we can achieve peace with Saudi Arabia with the leadership of President [Joe] Biden," the prime minister added.
Aharoni noted that peace with Saudi Arabia would be a "major event in the history of the Zionist movement," in the history of Israel-Arab conflicts, as well as in terms of Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.
"We have to understand from the very early days of political Zionism in the land of Israel, there's not been one day in which the Arabs truly and genuinely accepted Israel's right to exist," he said.
Also during his speech, Netanyahu said he's "long sought to make peace with the Palestinians, but "must not give the Palestinians the power of veto" over new peace treaties with other Arab states.
"Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas must stop spreading the horrible anti-Semitic conspiracies against the Jewish people and the Jewish state," Netanyahu said. "He recently said that [Adolph] Hitler wasn't an anti-Semite. You can't make this up. What do you do? He said that."
Aharoni, though, responded that the reason there has not been peace is not because of Abbas' rhetoric, which "with all due respect is because of their horrible policy mistakes."
The Palestinians have rejected compromises, and "in diplomacy, when you take the zero-sum approach, meaning all or nothing, theoretically, 50% you'll end up with nothing," he said. "Historically, since 1947, they've been ending up with nothing."
But that could change if they were to be "more pragmatic," said Aharoni.
"You have to take what is given to you at a certain point, like Israel did in 1947 with the partition plan right here at the United Nations, and then you build on it," he said. "You build on it, and you create a trajectory of progression. But this is not what the Palestinian leadership historically has done. And I think that the Palestinian people are suffering greatly because of this ongoing failure."
Netanyahu also spoke about Iran and the threat it poses to stabilizing security in the Middle East, and Aharoni stressed that Iran is not only a problem for Israel, but for the world.
"Iran is a problem for the entire international community, and I think it should be dealt with by the entire international community," he said. "Everybody knows the threat that Iran poses, the threat that stems in the first place because of the motivations that are in the DNA of this current regime," he said.
"Whether it's a nuclear bomb or nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or biological weapons, it doesn't matter," said Aharoni. "The motivation is the problem, what they stand for."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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