Netanyahu on Front Lines in Europe to Fight PA State

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will dig into the diplomatic front lines next week and fly to London and Paris as Europe tightens support for ‘Auschwitz Borders,” the phrase the late United Nations Ambassador Abba Eban used to describe the “Green Line” that existed until 1967.

The Israeli government has acknowledged that Prime Minister Netanyahu will travel to the European capitals next week to discuss “political matters” with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron. Prime Minister Netanyahu is to address the U.S. Congress shortly afterwards, while U.S. President Barack Obama prepares his ideas for establishing the Palestinian Authority as a new Arab country within Israel’s current borders. The president reportedly will reject the Arab world’s demand for the immigration of thousands of foreign Arabs to Israel. Abbas has said he will not surrender on the issue.

Palestinian Authority PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has almost won public support from leading European countries, particularly France and Britain, for leaning on Israel to sacrifice to the Palestinian Authority the homes of more than half a million Jews in United Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.

Abbas, since taking over from Yasser Arafat six years ago, has successfully globetrotted to build international support for his one-sided demands while going through the motions of accepting American-sponsored ideas to negotiate the terms of creating the PA state.

The United States last month thwarted plans by the Quartet – the United Nations, Russia, the United States and the European Union – to officially propose a PA state based on the old Armistice lines of 1949, often incorrectly termed "1967 borders", after the Arabs lost the war they launched as a rejection of the re-establishment of Israel as a country.

European leaders, acting independently of the United States, have announced their increasing support for Abbas’s demands, without any negotiations with Israel, where nearly 10 percent of the Jewish population lives in areas demanded by the PA.

"The recognition of a Palestinian state is an option that we are currently thinking about, with our European partners,” Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador to the United Nations said last week, one day after Abbas met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Abbas told France24 in an interview last week that “We can’t say that certain organizations or countries promised to recognize a Palestinian state. But all the signs they are sending show that they are awaiting the right moment to do so. You notice that a certain number of European countries have recently sent additional delegations and official representatives to the Palestinian territories. From our side, we are already treating them like ambassadors.”