A final-status agreement with the PA is currently not on the horizon, opposition leader Isaac Herzog (Zionist Camp – Labor) told the AIPAC Policy Conference Monday morning in Washington DC.
“I don’t feel that an immediate peace agreement between us and the Palestinians is realistic,” Herzog said. “As we see right now when there is a total lack of trust, there’s a lot of animosity between the peoples and the leaders, there’s hardly any relationship.”
Herzog said he believes that Israel must still make an effort to achieve such a goal. “I think that we need to preserve the two-state solution and work towards it,” He argued. “We should always be in direct eye contact with the ideal of moving towards a two-state solution because that will preserve the Jewish nature of the Jewish state.”
Israel, Herzog said, could extend the security fence in Judea and Samaria to further separate Jewish and Palestinian communities. “At this stage when we are in the midst of a very painful terror wave, we should work to disengage from the Palestinians, complete the security fence around the settlement blocs and around the Muslim villages around Jerusalem, move towards empowering the Palestinians behind the fence, and of course convene an international regional security conference that will converge all the interests of all the moderate parties concerned in the region against terror, Iran, and ISIL,” Herzog said.
Herzog also expressed support for using both military and diplomatic means to lower tensions. “We should combat terror with no mercy with no ifs and no buts,” he stressed. “Having said that, we should also try with diplomatic means and other means to calm down the situation.”