Netanyahu Plans to Promote Legislation on Jewish State Designation
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Version 0 of 1. JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he intended to promote legislation bolstering the status of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, anchoring the principle as one of the basic laws that serve as the country’s Constitution. The move comes as an apparent response to the Palestinians’ categorical rejection of Mr. Netanyahu’s demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state during nine months of American-brokered peace talks, which broke down late last month. “To my great regret, as we have seen recently, there are those who do not recognize this natural right,” Mr. Netanyahu said in televised remarks during a visit to Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, where the state’s establishment was declared in May 1948. Previous bills promoting Israel’s Jewish character introduced by politicians in 2011 and 2013 proved highly contentious, with Jewish critics and representatives of the country’s Arab minority saying the bills placed the state’s Jewish identity above democracy. Mr. Netanyahu sought to head off potential opposition, saying, “The State of Israel will always preserve the full equality, in personal and civil rights, of all its citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, in a Jewish and democratic country.” An official in Mr. Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister planned to form a team to draft a new bill in consultation with his coalition partners. Israel suspended the peace talks after President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority moved to pursue reconciliation with his rivals in Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza. That followed an Israeli refusal to release a final batch of Palestinian prisoners by a late March deadline and a subsequent Palestinian decision to join 15 international treaties and conventions, against strong Israeli and American objections. Speaking in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, on Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who had shepherded the negotiations, said the reconciliation agreement with Hamas had come “without any heads up.” In his first public comments since the talks ended, Mr. Kerry said the United States would “pause” its Middle East peacemaking efforts but held out the hope that it might find “quiet ways” to pursue “next steps.” Some experts have urged Mr. Kerry to present an American peace plan instead of abandoning the talks. Asked if he was prepared to make such a move, Mr. Kerry asserted that more progress had been made during the closed-door talks than critics realized, and he said he planned to make some of the details of the negotiations public at some point. “Both leaders took serious steps in order to engage in this discussion,” Mr. Kerry said during the visit to Ethiopia, where he began an African tour. “What has not been laid out publicly and what I will do at some appropriate moment of time is make clear to everybody the progress that was made.” Mr. Kerry had sought without success in recent months to negotiate a framework agreement that would outline the parameters of a comprehensive peace treaty. “Both parties still indicate that they feel it’s important to negotiate and want to find a way to negotiate,” Mr. Kerry said. “So we believe the best thing to do right now is pause, take a hard look at these things and find out what is possible and what is not possible in the days ahead.” |