Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu downplayed the significance of the Palestinian Authority’s dramatic government resignation Monday, referring to it as a game of “musical chairs.”
“They [the PA] have not had an election... for 17 years, so they are just shuffling chairs,” Netanyahu told Fox & Friends on Monday.
“The real thing we want to see is genuine de-radicalization. They have to stop teaching their children to become terrorists,” he stated.
Netanyahu underscored the importance of PA reform, including the end of its policy of providing monthly stipends to terrorists in Israeli jails and their families.
The PA has “to stop paying terrorists based on the amount of Jews they kill. They have to stop teaching and indoctrination a whole generation on the annihilation of Israel, that is real reform. That so far has not happened. I hope it does happen, but so far it has not happened,” Netanyahu stated.
He spoke hours after Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh announced his resignation, in a symbolic nod to calls from the US and others in the international community that it reform and revitalize itself in advance of plans to return it to Gaza in the aftermath of the Israel-Hamas war.
Abbas approves Shtayyeh's resignation
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accepted Shtayyeh’s resignation but asked that he and the government retain their roles in a caretaker capacity.
The United Nations and the United States issued supportive statements in response.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York it was a move that would help advance the prospects for a two-state resolution to the conflict.
A “strengthened, empowered Palestinian Government, that can administer the whole of the occupied Palestinian Territory, is critical as part of a path to achieving the establishment of a fully independent, democratic, contiguous, sovereign and viable Palestinian State, based on the 1967 lines, of which Gaza is an integral part, which remains the only way to achieve a lasting peace,” Dujarric stated.
In Washington US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the Biden Administration welcomes steps to advance a Palestinian Authority reform process.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has spoken with Abbas about this issue and encouraged the Palestinian Authority to pursue reform, Miller said.
“We think those steps are positive” and “important... to achieving a reunited Gaza and West Bank under the Palestinian Authority. We will continue to encourage them to take those steps,” Miller said.
“We have been engaged with them on the need to reform and revitalize the government and we have seen them start to take steps in that direction and we welcome them,” he added.
Israel has also called for a reformed PA, but rejected the idea that it could return to Gaza after the war, insisting that the enclave must be governed by Palestinian technocrats with no political affiliations in the intermediary phase.
Netanyahu pushed back at questions by Fox on Monday about whether the PA government’s resignation would advance the possibility of a two-state resolution to the conflict.
“Unfortunately what they [the PA] want is a one-state solution. They don’t want a state next to Israel, they want a state instead of Israel,” Netanyahu said.
He pointed to the proclamation against unilateral Palestinian statehood that the cabinet and the Knesset affirmed last week, emphasizing that it had the support of 99 out of the parliament’s 120 members.
The proclamation affirms that the only path to peace with the Palestinians is through direct negotiations.
California Governor Gavin Newsom told NBC on Sunday that Netanyahu was “doubling down on stupid as it relates to the two-state solution and walking away from that” as he called for the release of the hostages, to eliminate Hamas and “advance a two-state solution.”
Netanyahu said that “the people of Israel are not stupid. They understand that to just offer a Palestinian state is to give a platform for repeated attempts to annihilate the Jewish state.”
He emphasized that Israel would have to retain security control over that “territory for the foreseeable future and that does not come with unlimited Palestinian sovereignty.”
Reuters contributed to this report.