European Union’s Ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Andersen said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made the wrong decision in agreeing to release long-term Palestinian prisoners as part of the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
In an interview with the Times of Israel, he said that “had the EU been asked to advise Israel on which of the three positions sought by PA President Mahmoud Abbas to accept as the basis for discussion, accepting to discuss Palestinian statehood on the basis of the pre-1967 lines, accepting a settlement moratorium or releasing 104 pre-Oslo prisoners, I know which two of those the EU would have pointed the Israeli government to take. You didn’t do that.”
“That’s your own sovereign choice. You also have to deal with the consequences,” he said.
As part of restarting peace talks with the Palestinians, Israel agreed to the release of over 100 terrorists with “blood on their hands” - men who have directly participated in the murder of Israeli men, women and children - in four phases, the last of which is scheduled to be implemented later this month.
“The fact that these pre-Oslo prisoners are being released and coming back and being treated as heroes, is at the outset facilitated by you, because you are releasing them,” Faaborg-Andersen said.
In the interview he rejected the idea that Europe was disproportionately critical of Israel. The EU, he said, had “basically only one quarrel with Israel as far as the peace process is concerned, and that is the settlements,” which he said were “particularly destructive for creating the kind of confidence and negotiating environment that is necessary to succeed.”
The EU, he noted, considered settlements to be “illegal under international law and unhelpful on top of it.”
He likened ongoing settlement expansion during the peace process to “starting to eat a cake while you are discussing how to slice it,” and said the European public saw it as “a bit underhanded to continue expanding settlements in the territory which is subject to negotiations.”
Israel, he advised, “would do itself a big service by putting a freeze on settlement expansion, particularly during a time of serious negotiation.”