Marwan Muasher says usual diplomatic tools won’t work with Netanyahu’s hardline government; wants 1994 peace treaty ‘reviewed’
ToI StaffToday, 11:58 am
Jordan’s first ambassador to Israel, who subsequently served as the kingdom’s foreign minister, has said that the two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer a possibility and that Amman needs to change its approach to relations given Jerusalem’s hardline government.
“We are dealing with a religiously and ethnically extremist Israeli government…which is impossible to be flexible and adaptive to,” Marwan Muasher said, according to an unofficial translation of an Radio Al-Balad interview this week published on the Ammanet website.
“The old tools that Jordan used to deal with the Israeli government no longer work on this government,” Muasher said, adding that Amman needed to change its approach and stop working with Israel “diplomatically and flexibly.”
“When extremism is the byword of the government, diplomatic tools do not work on it. This government does not give any weight to diplomatic tools,” Muasher said. “And if the government is extremist from two angles, ethnically extremist and religiously extremist? Never before in the history of Israel has there been such a government, in which some of its members openly believe that Palestinians have no right to exist, and define the Land of Israel as including Jordan and Palestine.”
Last month, Jordan summoned the Israeli envoy in protest of far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s speech at a conference in Paris, during which he claimed the Palestinian people are an “invention” while standing behind a map of “Greater Israel” that includes modern-day Jordan. Days earlier, Smotrich stirred international outrage with a call to “wipe out” a Palestinian town in the West Bank following the killing of two Israeli brothers in a terror attack.
The former envoy also said that Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel “needs to be reviewed.”
“We are still acting within the Oslo Accords that ended 30 years ago, and it is clear that the Palestinian state is not in the process of being established. Hence there is a national need to review Jordan’s accounts,” he said.
Content retrieved from: https://www.timesofisrael.com/jordans-1st-israel-envoy-no-chance-of-2-state-solution-amman-must-change-approach/.
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