Israel must recognize that the world will not agree to continued Israeli rule over the Palestinian people, the country's defense minister said in remarks Monday. In his comments to Israel Radio on Monday, Ehud Barak said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has "done things that didn't come naturally to it."
"But we also shouldn't delude ourselves," he added. "The growing alienation between us and the United States is not good for the state of Israel." The way to narrow that gap is to embark on an Israeli diplomatic initiative "that doesn't shy from dealing with all the core issues" dividing Israelis and Palestinians, he said.
The pursuit of that big-picture program and "broad willingness to reach an agreement" has allowed Israel to get past the friction with the Americans over settlement construction in the past, Barak said.
The Israeli defense minister dismissed talk of an imposed U.S. solution. But he warned that while Israel is militarily strong, it needs international legitimacy as well. "The world isn't willing to accept — and we won't change that in 2010 — the expectation that Israel will rule another people for decades more," he said. "It's something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world."
Palestinians aspire to a state of their own, he said, and "there is no other way, whether you like it or not, than to let them rule themselves."
