Washington – Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich said he supports a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that includes two separate states, but he did not step back Saturday from his assertion that Palestinians are an “invented” people, an incendiary comment that infuriated one side in the Mideast peace process.
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The burden to show a willingness to reach a peace accord with the Israelis lies squarely with the Palestinians, he said.
“When the president keeps talking about a peace process while Hamas keeps firing missiles into Israel, if we had a country next to us firing missiles, how eager would we be to sit down and negotiate?” Gingrich told a veterans forum in Des Moines, before participating in a nationally televised debate with six other GOP candidates vying for the presidential nomination.
Palestinian officials reacted furiously on Saturday to Gingrich’s assertion, accusing the Republican presidential hopeful of incitement and staging a “cheap stunt” to court the Jewish vote.
The remarks struck at the heart of Palestinian sensitivities about the righteousness of their struggle for an independent state and put him at odds not only with the international community but with all but an extremist fringe in Israel. Mainstream Israelis, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, support the idea of an independent Palestine alongside Israel as part of a final peace agreement.
As Gingrich has risen to lead in national and early-voting-state polls, he has come under criticism from his party rivals for making inflammatory statements. The Palestinian comments intensified that scrutiny with less than four weeks until Iowa’s precinct caucuses kick off the nominating contests on Jan. 3.
In footage released Friday, the former House speaker told the Jewish Channel, a U.S. cable TV network, that the Palestinians were an “invented people.”
“Remember, there was no Palestine as a state — (it was) part of the Ottoman Empire. I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many places,” Gingrich said according to a video excerpt posted online.
Gingrich sought to clarify his position later Saturday, saying in Iowa that he supports a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, including a Palestinian state.
In a statement, Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond said that “to understand what is being proposed and negotiated you have to understand decades of complex history — which is exactly what Gingrich was referencing.”
“Newt Gingrich supports a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, which will necessarily include agreement between Israel and the Palestinians over the borders of a Palestinian state,” Hammond said in the statement.
Those latest comments appeared unlikely to calm the uproar among Palestinian officials.
The Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, demanded that Gingrich “review history.”
“From the beginning, our people have been determined to stay on their land,” Fayyad said in comments reported by the Palestinian news agency Wafa. “This, certainly, is denying historical truths.”
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, accused Gingrich of incitement. “Mark my words … these statements of Gingrich’s will be the ammunitions and weapons of the bin Ladens and the extremists for a long, long time,” Erekat told CNN.
The Palestinians have never had an independent state of their own. The region was ruled by the Ottomans for several centuries, and when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, the British took control of the area. It was known as the British Mandate for Palestine, and Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians.
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin sharply criticized Gingrich’s comments as cynical attempts to curry support with Jewish voters and unhelpful to the peace process.
“The vast majority of American Jews (including this one) and the Israeli Government itself are committed to a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians live side-by-side as neighbors and in peace,” Levin said in a statement. “Gingrich offered no solutions — just a can of gasoline and a match.”
And while Gingrich sought to reassert his openness to a two-state solution, which has been the position of Republican and Democratic administrations, he said it was appropriate to discuss the history of the region.
“We have a challenge in the Middle East, and this is one where we’re going to have a national debate that’s going to be very difficult and that people are going to find at times very frustrating,” he told about 100 veterans in a theater near Drake University a few hours before the debate. “We can’t have an honest conversation about what’s going on in the Middle East, we can’t even discuss what the roots of the problem are.”
After the Arabs rejected an international plan calling for the establishment of Jewish and Arab states, part of the land became the state of Israel. During the 1948 war surrounding the Jewish state’s creation, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes.
Just as Israeli identity was forged after a long nationalist struggle staged by Zionist Jews for a state of their own, the identity of Palestinian Arabs was also hewn by their own decades-long struggle over the same land.
Shortly after taking office in 2009, Netanyahu endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state, abandoning his Likud Party’s traditional opposition to the idea. More moderate Israeli leaders have sought a peace deal with the Palestinians for the past two decades.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations in the U.S. also have endorsed Palestinian statehood.
Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a top official in the PLO, said that Gingrich was seeking a “cheap way” to win Jewish and pro-Israel voters in next year’s election.
Some Israeli politicians on the margins of the Israeli consensus welcomed Gingrich’s stance. Danny Danon, deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, and a minority voice among his hawkish Likud party, said Gingrich “understands very well the reality we live in in the Middle East” and said his statement on the Palestinians is shared by “most of the Jewish people, not just in Israel.”
Israeli historian Tom Segev, however, said the argument about the existence of the Palestinian people is a thing of the past.
“There is no intelligent person today who argues about the existence of the Palestinian people,” Segev said.
“Nations are created gradually. I don’t think the Palestinians are less of a nation than the Americans,” he added.
Stay with it Newt! So far Michele Bachmann has been the only one with the testosterone in this race.
Dear Mr. Gingrich: Before 1948 there was no State of Israel. The Jewish People were a religious community commanded by the Torah of Hashem to live in peace with all nations until the coming of the Mashiach. The Zionists have turned the Jewish People on its head, brainwashed them and asserted that they are simply a national group with a state like any other nation in the world that exists to promote its own military and economic and political interests.
The changed Jewish People inflicted war on the Middle East, especially among Arab neighbors among whom Jews had lived in peace and prospered for centuries, in Baghdad, in Cairo, in Casa Blanca. And now you wish to support the regiime where Jews are in mortal peril of war because of the 230 nuclear warheads used by the Zionists as the sword of Damocles over the entire world.
Gingrich has absolutly no chance of becomeing our next president. That said, his honesty and refusal to temper his comments by being polically correct are refreshing
Thank you, Newt.
I have not made mind yp yet except that the President needs to become unemployed as of 12:01pm Jan. 20,2013. However maybe what the nation needs is someone willing to speak truth to power and to stick to it. How often have Arabs whined at every opportunity. Maybe it is time to speak the truth and not tolerate being bullyed by folks using our own sense of decency as a weapon? IT has to stop before the US turns in to France or Sweden et al that being overun by passive Moslem/Islamic conquest.
The truth is painful. The facts are, as Mr. Gingrich has so plainly explained it. I’ve said it here many times before. Folowing politics for the past 35+ years, I’ve watched the Democratic Party “flub” the truth and tell everyone what they want to hear, but not what is factually correct. This continues under Obama at levels not seen since the Carter Administration. Across the board, Obama supporters will tell you factually incorrect statements about Obama to make him look more likeable to the masses. The Republican Party has a very big job ahead of them due to the hundreds of thousands of “inner city” voters that know only what they hear on TV or blasted at them on their Sunday worship – as Obama was under Rev. J. Wright. The fact the Obama having admitted to attending Wrights sermons for 20+ years is alone a reason to concern Americans that he is brainwashed. Aside from that, we now stand 3 years into his presidency and he did nothing to change the status quo of multitudes of unemployment etc. That means, whatever he said he’d do – & actually did do, have admittedly been unsuccessful – a total catastrophic failure. Time for change! Down with hope! Back to the tried & true!
And Tom Segev isn’t going to win any points among Americans by comparing us to Palestinians.
To #2 - This propaganda that you and others in Neterei Karta have been spreading, that prior to the Zionists and the State of Israel, that Muslims lived in peace with the Jews, and treated them well, is a bunch of nonsense. One only has to read about the pogroms and massacres of Jews in Hebron in 1929, and 1936, by fanatical Muslims. Over the centuries, Jews did not always fare better under Muslim rule, than they did under Christian rule.
Hi to all of you, Whoever read this months Z’man Magazine cover story, About The Jewish Guest of Honor invited by Muammar Qaddafi, you read how jews lived in Libya for about 2500 years untroubled, with the Arab neighbors until the creation of I sreal was declared which turned the Arabs against the Jews and about 30000 Jews left then Libya for Isreal…
So Don’t bash #2 as Naturei Kartei or as a non-sense statement,
“Mark my words … these statements of Gingrich’s will be the ammunitions and weapons of the bin Ladens and the extremists for a long, long time,” Erekat told CNN.”
That’s the real “cheap trick.”
Newt is stepping in dangerous water, but I support the comments.
Thank you Newt for standing by what you said and telling the truth! For those who want to raise all of the negative aspects of Gingrich’s past, he has already done so. He accepts the blame, he is wrong and Hashem will deal with him, stop standing in judgement of others as if you live without sin.