Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas will work with any Israeli government that accepts the principle of a two-state solution, his spokesman said after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu won a surprise landslide reelection victory.
“It doesn’t matter to us who the next prime minister of Israel is, what we expect from this government is to recognize the two-state solution,” Nabil Abu Rudeina said in a statement.
“On this basis, we will continue to cooperate with any Israeli government that is committed to international resolutions.”
Rudeina’s low-key statement follows an all-out tirade against the Israeli election results by senior PLO official Yasser Abed Rabbo.
Abed Rabbo called on the PA to halt all security coordination with Israel in response to the right-wing victory in Israel.
Over the course of the election campaign, Netanyahu’s position on a two state solution – in which Israel would be expected to expel all Jews from Judea and Samaria and hand over the territory to the PA – became a topic of some intrigue, particularly during his last-minute, successful attempt to woo nationalist voters by rejecting the concept given the current regional upheaval.
In an interview with Arutz Sheva Netanyahu insisted that he had changed his position since the 2009 Bar Ilan speech, in which he declared support for establishing a Palestinian state. Netanyahu cited a change in the realities of the Middle East as being behind his shift.
However, just days earlier, his office denied a report in which MK Tzipi Hotovely said Netanyahu had renounced the Bar Ilan speech as being “void,” saying that this was Hotovely’s position, not Netanyahu’s.
In terms of the PA’s own commitment to “international resolutions”, Israeli officials have pointed out that last year’s nine-month talks ultimately broke down in acrimony after Abbas violated previous treaties and launched a unilateral diplomatic offensive against Israel in the UN and the ICC.
AFP contributed to this report.