Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s adviser on U.S.-Israeli relations on Sunday reacted to the video published by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last Friday, in which he said that the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) demand that the future Palestinian state be free of Jews amounted to ethnic cleansing.
Hours after it was released, the State Department condemned Netanyahu's video, saying the administration believed that using the term “ethnic cleansing” was “inappropriate and unhelpful.”
PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas also blasted Netanyahu’s video, calling his remarks “toxic wind gusts” and adding that the purpose of the video is to break the will of Palestinians.
"We are not as not isolated as the Israeli government is trying to show. The government of the occupation is the one that's isolated, because it does not want to advance one step in the way of peace,” Abbas charged.
“[The Israeli government] continues to build settlements, desecrate holy sites, perform ethnic cleansing and premeditated murder, which brings them international criticism all over the world. We do not blow balloons in the air about peace. We call to implement it on the ground,” continued Abbas.
Speaking to Haaretz, Trump's adviser, David Friedman, blasted the Obama administration and said they “should be ashamed of their misguided reaction” to the video.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu makes exactly the right point. The Palestinians want Israel to absorb countless 'refugees' - people who never lived in Israel and whose ancestors were never forced to leave Israel - while their so-called 'state' is required to be, as the Nazis said, judenrein (devoid of Jews). It is an entirely racist and anti-Semitic position,” Friedman told the newspaper in an email exchange.
“Arabs live and work side by side with Israelis in the State of Israel. They attend universities, enjoy the strongest human and civil rights (including women's rights) in the region, and have access to world class health care. There is no better place for Arabs to live in the Middle East than in the State of Israel. With this background in mind, the Prime Minister of Israel correctly observes that the Palestinian demand to remove all Jews from their ancestral homeland in Judea and Samaria is nothing short of an attempt at ethnic cleansing. The State Department should be ashamed of their misguided reaction to Mr. Netanyahu's remarks,” he added.
“The United States frequently refers to the ‘two state solution’ as two states for two peoples. The Palestinian response - which the U.S. State Department refuses to challenge - is ‘one state for two peoples (Israel) and a second state just for Palestinian Arabs.’ It is no wonder that the State Department under Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have lost credibility in the region,” Friedman told Haaretz.