RIYADH: Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries Sunday condemned remarks by Israel’s prime minister who appeared to suggest in an interview that a Palestinian state could be established on Saudi territory.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks, which some Israeli media characterised as a joke, came with the region already on edge over the potential displacement of Palestinians after US President Donald Trump first floated the idea of moving Gazans to neighbouring countries.
Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Sunday that the thinking behind Netanyahu’s remarks “is unacceptable and reflects a complete detachment from reality”, adding that such ideas “are nothing more than mere fantasies or illusions”.
The Saudi foreign ministry, meanwhile, noting the importance of the Palestinian issue to the Arab world, stressed “its categorical rejection to such statements that aim to divert attention from the continuous crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian brothers in Gaza”.
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A ministry statement welcomed “the condemnation, disapproval and total rejection announced by the brotherly countries towards what Benjamin Netanyahu stated regarding the displacement of the Palestinian people”.
In a television interview on Thursday, right-wing Israeli journalist Yaakov Bardugo was discussing with Netanyahu the prospect of diplomatic normalisation with Saudi Arabia when he appeared to misspeak, attributing to Riyadh the stance that there would be “no progress without a Saudi state”.
“Palestinian state?” Netanyahu corrected him.
“Unless you want the Palestinian state to be in Saudi Arabia,” the Israeli premier quipped. “They (the Saudis) have plenty of territory.”
Bardugo responded that he did “not rule this out”.
Netanyahu went on to describe the talks leading up to the so-called Abraham Accords, in which several Arab countries normalised ties with Israel, concluding: “I think we should allow this process to take its course.”
But the suggestion of a state for Palestinians outside the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank prompted an outpouring of regional condemnation, including from Qatar, Egypt and the Palestinian foreign ministry, which described the remarks as “racist”.
For Palestinians, any attempt to force them out of Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba”, or catastrophe – the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.
In its statement, Saudi Arabia said “this extremist, occupying mentality does not understand what the Palestinian land means” to Palestinians.
Such a mindset, it added, “does not think that the Palestinian people deserve to live in the first place, as it has completely destroyed the Gaza Strip” and killed tens of thousands “without the slightest human feeling or moral responsibility”.
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