Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, expressed the view that all of Palestine should be called "The Land of Israel".
He said that Israel had "made bold, perhaps wrong decisions" in the past regarding Palestine, in particular by agreeing to the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority, as well as by unilaterally withdrawing from the Gaza Strip and withdrawing all troops and settlements there.
„Israel has given the peace process with the Palestinians many chances. The Palestinians have never had sovereign authority over this land in the country's history. What you call Palestine... You know, Palestine is the name that Emperor Hadrian gave to the Land of Israel when he conquered it (after the suppression of the Jewish revolt in 135 - editor's note). After the destruction of Jerusalem, he built a new city in its place and called it Aelia Capitolina, but no one in the world today remembers what Aelia Capitolina is, but everyone knows what Jerusalem is. So what you call Palestine is the Land of Israel“, Saar claims.
At the same time, he expressed regret that Israel, “despite all its efforts, has not found a partner in all these years to move towards true peace“. "Instead, we have an enemy that has never abandoned the path of terrorism, incitement, and whose will to destroy is much stronger than its will to create its own state," the Israeli minister believes.
When asked about the prospects for a long-term settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Saar rejected the idea of creating two states and pointed to the option of granting the Palestinians autonomy status. According to him, such a solution is conditioned by the Camp David Accords, concluded between Israel and Egypt with the mediation of the United States in 1979.
“There is no big difference between the current Palestinian authority and the idea of autonomy. “Autonomy means self-rule, they manage their own lives, but they do not have the means to threaten our security“, he explained.
The head of the Israeli Foreign Ministry called the presence of armed groups that are not under his country's control, west of the Jordan River, unacceptable and expressed the opinion that the final settlement of the issue can be achieved through broad regional agreements.
“We need to spend more time talking about regional formats, because I believe that in the long term, when peace is achieved in the region in the future, the solution will be a regional format. But the idea of the future status of the Palestinians is autonomy. Autonomy can give the Palestinians self-rule and security for Israel“, Saar is confident.