Israel’s former Foreign Minister and Vice Prime Minister Tzipi Livni once said (during the Annapolis process of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations) that Israel was not going to just withdraw from the West Bank and throw the keys over The Wall…
Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu said more or less the same thing, during his office’s annual reception for members of the foreign/international press in Israel.
AP reported that Netanyahu “said the experience of rocket attacks from the Lebanese and Gaza borders means Israel must be able to prevent such weapons from being brought into any future Palestinian state in the West Bank. ‘We cannot afford to have that across from the center of our country … In the case of a future settlement with the Palestinians, this will require an Israeli presence on the eastern side of a prospective Palestinian state’, he said, without elaborating”. The AP’s Steve Gutkin then noted, in this story, that “Netanyahu has not outlined how much, if any, of the West Bank he would be willing to give up”. The AP report can be read in full here.