Senior US Republican Congressman Eric Cantor said on Thursday that the world should stop pressuring Israel over settlements and concentrate instead on the threat from a nuclear Iran. Cantor, Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, said the main obstacle to Middle East peace is the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and not the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “I don't quite know what is driving the focus on the issue of settlements,” he told Israeli public radio. “We believe the focus should be on the existential threat to Israel from a nuclear-armed Iran,” said Cantor, who is leading a 25-strong delegation of Republican lawmakers on a weeklong visit. Since hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won elections in February, Israel has come under increasing pressure from US President Barack Obama to freeze settlement construction in east Occupied Jerusalem and the Occupied West Bank, considered illegal by the international community. But Netanyahu has tried to shift world attention to Iran, which both Israel and the United States suspect of using a legal civilian nuclear programme to mask illegal designs on a bomb. Cantor insisted Washington should push for tough sanctions on the “terrorist regime” in Iran. “We share the view with Prime Minister Netanyahu that we do not want to see undue pressure placed on Israel.” Cantor, the Republican party's only Jewish representative in Congress, said it is up to the Palestinians to make the running in reviving stalled peace talks with Israel. “If we are interested in a two-state solution we have to accept, and the Palestinians have to accept, that Israel is a Jewish state,” he said. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has so far refused to recognize Israel as “the state of the Jewish people”, a key Israeli precondition for talks. US wants settlement freeze On the other hand, an Israeli newspaper reported that the US had asked Israel to freeze West Bank settlement for a year to prod Arab countries to take steps towards normalizing relations with the Jewish state. Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in interviews with two Israeli radio stations, made no comment on the report in the Haaretz newspaper. But he said “an attempt to reach understandings” with Washington over a suspension of construction in settlements was being held in tandem with US President Barack Obama's efforts to persuade Arab countries to make overtures to Israel and revive peace talks. “All this is in the context of a broad plan for a comprehensive regional agreement that is apparently shaping up as a possible initiative by President Obama with the main focus on the Palestinians and a door kept open, after a certain delay, for Syria and Lebanon,” Barak told Israel Radio. The Haaretz newspaper said a proposal for a one-year settlement freeze in the occupied West Bank was raised by Obama's special envoy, George Mitchell, during talks in Jerusalem last week with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel prefers a six-month freeze, the newspaper said.
