Bibi Netanyahu Responds To Bill Clinton: I Am Not The One Moving The Goalposts

From ABC’s David Muir interview with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday afternoon:

MUIR: President Obama and former President Clinton, for that matter, did not support this move by the Palestinians before the U.N. today.

But President Clinton was quoted in the last 24 hours, bluntly saying, reportedly, that your government is to blame for the continued failure of the Middle East peace process, saying that you’d essentially moved the goalposts when you came to power. How do you react to that?

NETANYAHU: Oh, I respectfully disagree. You know, President Clinton knows very well in 2000 at Camp David that — who really made the generous offer, and the Palestinians refused to come. I’m sure that President Bush can tell you what happened at Camp David a few years later, when another Israeli prime minister made a generous offer, and the Palestinians refused to come.

I’ve made a series of offers on day one and since then, on coming to office this trip, and the Palestinians refused to come. The reason they refuse to come is they get away with it. They get a free ride. They basically refuse to sit down and negotiate. And they’re — and we’re branded as the opponents of peace. As long as that continues, they’ll continue to avoid negotiations.

MUIR: But have the goalposts been moved since President Clinton, Camp David, and since President Bush as well?

NETANYAHU: Not at all. I think that the Palestinians so far have not responded to these suggestions. I’d be interested in hearing their response to it. But the most important thing is rather than try to end the negotiations before they begin, I suggest just begin the negotiations. It’s so simple. What could be simpler than a suggestion to just sit down?

Now, there are a lot of things we have to negotiate about. Settlements is one of them. I’ll tell you what the other one is, security. Israel is so tiny. It’s, you know, a little less than the length of Manhattan, without the West Bank, without Judea and Samaria.

So how do we protect it? We’re going to have to have security arrangements, solid security arrangements on the ground, a long-term Israeli military presence in strategic areas in the West Bank. And that requires a negotiation.

And the Palestinians are basically trying to shortcut this. They’re trying to get a state without giving us peace, and without giving us security. That’s wrong. I called on them today to have — to come and negotiate the recognition and security that I think will make peace a real thing, something that could endure for generations.

Jeff Dunetz argues that Netanyahu has offered more concessions than his predecessors. Tweet