[An Nahar] An Israeli minister on Sunday said Washington's top diplomat was "wrong" for pressuring Israel in peace talks, a day before Paleostinian leader the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial...
visits the White House.
His remarks came two days after U.S. Secretary of State John F.
I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry
Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a
lucky hat,conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State...
criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's repeated demand that the Paleostinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
"John Kerry is wrong because he is putting pressure on the wrong side," said Environment Minister Gilad Erdan, who is considered close to Netanyahu.
"Kerry should be asking Abu Mazen (Abbas) why he is stubbornly refusing to recognize Israel as the Jewish state," he told public radio.
The demand, which was only placed on the table several months ago by Netanyahu, has been consistently rejected by the Paleostinians and is now threatening to derail the peace talks ahead of an April 29 deadline.
Kerry waded into the debate on Friday, saying he believed it was a "mistake" to raise the issue over and over again -- in what was taken as open criticism of Netanyahu.
"I think it's a mistake for some people to be raising it again and again as the critical decider of their attitude toward the possibility of a state and peace," Kerry told a congressional hearing, adding that Washington had made its position "clear."
He said such recognition was clear in UN resolutions and it was also confirmed by the late Paleostinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1988 and in 2004.
The Paleostinians, who recognized Israel as a state in the early 1990s, have said that accepting its religious character would ignore its Arab minority and amount to giving up on the "right of return" of Paleostinian refugees.