Former Saudi General: We'll Open an Embassy in Tel Aviv
JERUSALEM, Israel – A former Saudi general's claim that his country would open an embassy in Tel Aviv if Israel accepted the 2002 Arab peace initiative didn't evoke a response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Former Maj.-Gen. Anwar Eski made the remark during an interview with al-Jazeera, the Jerusalem Post reported on Wednesday.
The 2002 Arab initiative, which remains a nonstarter to this day, calls for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 armistice lines in exchange for "normalization" with the Arab world. The late Israeli U.N. Ambassador Abba Eban called them the Auschwitz borders because they're simply indefensible.
"We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967," then Foreign Minister Eban said at the United Nations in 1969. "For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz."
Today, neither Fatah nor Hamas embrace a two-state solution that would theoretically pave the way for peaceful coexistence. Rather, each envisions a Palestinian state replacing Israel. They've said it openly, if not in English, then in Arabic, and that's what they teach their children.
Israel has been concerned for years with the Palestinian narrative in media, school curriculum and culture, which many believe fans the flame of incitement.
Just this week, children in the Gaza Strip presented a play depicting terror attacks against Israeli soldiers. Hamas broadcast the program on its culture channel, according to a report on Israel's Channel 2 news.
On its official Facebook page, Fatah's military wing praised the recent bus bombing in Jerusalem, blessing "the self-sacrificing operation" and calling it "a natural response to [Israel's] ongoing crimes," the Palestinian Media Watch reported.
Last summer, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, claimed an enrollment of 25,000 Gazans in its terror training camps to prepare "spiritually, intellectually and physically" to liberate "Palestine" from the "Zionist occupiers."
Earlier this week, Netanyahu asked the attorney general to investigate an elementary school in Jerusalem's Jabel Mukhaber neighborhood for inviting families of terrorists to speak with the children.
