Lieberman scoffs at "Land for Peace, Right of Return" Slogans

The international community has to "stop speaking in slogans" if it really wants to help the new ‘Israeli' government work toward a solution to the Palestinian conflict and help bring stability to the Middle East, ‘Israeli' Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, in his first interview with an ‘Israeli' newspaper since taking the job.

"Over the last two weeks I've had many conversations with my colleagues around the world," he said. "Just today, I saw the political adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Chinese foreign minister and the Czech prime minister. And everybody, you know, speaks with you like you're in a campaign: Occupation, settlements, settlers..."

Slogans like these, and others Lieberman cited, such as "land for peace" and "two-state solution," were both overly simplistic and ignored the root causes of the ongoing conflict, he said.

The fact was, said the ‘Israel' Beiteinu leader, that the Palestinian issue was "deadlocked" despite what he claimed "the best efforts of a series of dovish ‘Israeli' governments."

"Economy, security, stability," he repeated. "It's impossible to artificially impose any political solution. It will fail, for sure. You cannot start any peace process from nothing. You must create the right situation, the right focus, and the right conditions."

He said the ‘Israeli' government would be completing its thorough foreign policy review in the next two weeks, and that it would be made public for the first time at the scheduled May 18 White House talks between US President Barack Obama and ‘Israeli' Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

In the course of his wide-ranging interview, which will appear in full in Tuesday's Jerusalem Post Independence Day supplement, Lieberman insistently refused to rule in, or rule out, Palestinian statehood alongside ‘Israel' as the essence of a permanent accord, but emphatically endorsed Netanyahu's declared desire not to rule over a single Palestinian.

Equally emphatically, he said no peace proposal that so much as entertained the notion of a "right of return" to ‘Israel' for Palestinian refugees could serve as a basis for negotiation. "It cannot be on the table. I'm not ready to even discuss the 'right of return' of even one refugee," he said.

Lieberman said the new ‘Israeli' government would have no dealings with Hamas, which needed to be "suffocated," and that the international community also had to maintain the long-standing Quartet preconditions for dealing with the Islamic resistance group.

LIEBERMAN HITS OUT AT IRAN, SYRIA
Lieberman also said Iran is a key obstacle to resolving the Middle East conflict and spoke out against resuming indirect talks with Syria.

The ‘Israeli' FM claimed that the biggest obstacle to any comprehensive solution, he said, "is not ‘Israel'. It is not the Palestinians. It's the Iranians. It would be impossible, to resolve any problem in our region without resolving the Iranian problem."

He said the prime responsibility for thwarting Iran's march to a nuclear capability lay with the international community, not ‘Israel', and especially the five permanent members of the Security Council. He was confident that stringent economic sanctions could yet achieve the desired result, and said he did not even "want to think about the consequences of a crazy nuclear arms race in the region."

He said it would be "impossible to resolve any problem in our region without resolving the Iranian problem."

Noting what he called Syria's deepening ties with Iran, Lieberman said he saw no point whatsoever in resuming the indirect talks with Damascus conducted by the last government. "We don't see any good will from the Syrian side," he said. "Only the threats, like 'If you're not ready to talk, we'll retake the Golan by military action...'"

'Israel' occupied the Golan in the 1967 Six-Day War and annexed it in 1981 in a move never recognized by the international community. In May last year, Syria and ‘Israel' began indirect talks after negotiations halted eight years earlier over the fate of the strategic plateau.

Asked whether it troubled him to be perceived as an extremist in some circles, including overseas, Lieberman laughed and said, "So it's easy for me to surprise them."

He said he believed his international colleagues "respect me, and that they understand that I say what I mean, and I mean every word that I say."

As to whether his legal problems - he is under police investigation for alleged corruption - or other factors might lead to his ouster from the job, he said he believed this coalition would serve its full term, and that he would serve the full term as foreign minister.