GAZA/RAMALLAH — Palestinian leaders on Wednesday called for international pressure on Israel and support for their unilateral moves toward statehood after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's election win. Netanyahu's surprise victory, after pledging in the final days of the campaign that there would be no Palestinian state as long as he was in power, left Palestinians grim about prospects for a negotiated solution to a decades-old conflict. “It is clear Israel has voted for burying the peace process, against the two-state choice and for the continuation of occupation and settlement,” Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator in talks with Israel that collapsed in April, told Voice of Palestine radio. Seeking to shore up right-wing votes and saying that militants would move into any territory relinquished by Israel, Netanyahu also vowed to keep building settlements on occupied land Palestinians seek for a state. Palestinian leaders said a fourth term for the Likud party leader meant they must press forward with unilateral steps toward independence, including filing charges against Israel at the International Criminal Court. “This makes it more necessary than ever to go to the international community, and to go to the ICC and escalate peaceful resistance and boycott against the occupation,” Wasel Abu Youssef, a Palestine Liberation Organization leader, told Reuters. The Palestinians are due to become ICC members on April 1. Erekat called in a statement on the international community to back Palestinian efforts “to internationalize our struggle for dignity and freedom through the International Criminal Court and through all other peaceful means”. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, taxi driver Zeyad Maaly said Palestinians should now rise up against Israel in the occupied territory. “There will never be peace, not even in dreams,” he said. Ismail Ahmed, who drives a taxi in Hamas-run Gaza, where Israel and Palestinian militant groups fought a 50-day war last summer, said Palestinians should now put aside their differences and join in a common front against Israel. “This is the only way we can make them recognise us,” Ahmed said. Netanyahu's stand against a Palestinian state had already threatened to strain ties with the US and Europe. The parliaments of several European countries, including Britain and France, have called on their governments to recognize an independent state of Palestine in the past year, reflecting exasperation at continued settlement building on occupied land. Sweden formally recognized Palestine in October. Netanyahu, who in 2009 had endorsed the two-state solution, seemed on course to form a coalition government leaning further to the right than his outgoing cabinet, which had included two centrist parties and engaged in the US-brokered peace talks. ‘Masquerade is over' In his new coalition, Netanyahu is expected to include his natural allies, religious and far-right parties, as well as one centrist party which campaigned on internal social-economic issues rather than on matters of war and peace. Yariv Oppenheimer, head of the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now, said he was concerned that as head of rightist-dominated government, Netanyahu would move forward more easily toward expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, enclaves many countries view as illegal. “Netanyahu's masquerade is over. Everything's clear now, we're talking about a man who has sworn allegiance to the right, not about a centrist,” Oppenheimer said. — Reuters
