Moshe Ya'alon
Moshe Ya'alonFlash 90

The conflict with the Arabs will not end even if Israel withdraws to the pre-1967 borders, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said on Thursday.

Ya’alon, who is in the United States, made the comments during a visit to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he met with wounded American soldiers.

"As far as the Palestinians are concerned, the conflict will not end with the 1967 borders,” he said, in comments related to Wednesday’s terrorist attack in Jerusalem in which a three-month-old baby was murdered.

“The heart of the conflict is the lack of desire on their part to recognize us and our right to exist as a Jewish state. The Palestinian education system and the Palestinian rhetoric cause the incidents that are occurring in Jerusalem,” added Ya’alon.

"Yesterday we saw the result of this in the murder of an infant in Jerusalem by a young man with a Hamas-related background,” he continued. “Why did it happen? It happened because in the Palestinian Authority, kindergarten children as young as three are taught, for example, to put on explosive belts and use them to kill Jews. As long as this is the situation, and Palestinian youth are educated to kill Jews, there will never really be peace here.”

Ya’alon’s comments echo ones he made on Wednesday night, hours after the terrorist attack in Jerusalem.

Speaking at a gathering in Washington, Yaalon said that the PA has never sought peace. “The terror attack Wednesday is the natural outcome of the education to incitement against Jews given to every Palestinian schoolchild, and the encouraging of the concept that the Jews will eventually be eliminated. The incitement starts with lies told by Abbas at the UN,” he said.

Incitement in the PA includes the glorification of Nazism and the lionization of Adolf Hitler, as well as programs on official PA television featuring heavily-stereotyped Jews as villains (and encouraging violence against them), and various TV and radio shows which literally wipe the Jewish state off the map.