An influential Israeli rabbi has said God should strike the Palestinians and their leader with a plague, calling for their death in a fiery sermon before Middle East peace talks set to begin next week. “Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth,” Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in Israel's government, said in a sermon late Saturday, using Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's popular name. “God should strike them and these Palestinians – evil haters of Israel – with a plague,” the 89-year-old rabbi said in his weekly address to the faithful, excerpts of which were broadcast on Israeli radio Sunday. The US State Department condemned the rabbi's comments as “deeply offensive.” “We regret and condemn the inflammatory statements by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef,” State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said in a statement. “These remarks are not only deeply offensive, but incitement such as this hurts the cause of peace.” The Iraqi-born cleric has made similar remarks before, most notably in 2001, during a Palestinian uprising, when he called for Arabs' annihilation and said it was forbidden to be merciful to them. He later said he was referring only to “terrorists” who attacked Israelis in the 1990s. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said Yosef's latest comments were tantamount to calling for “genocide against Palestinians”. The rabbi's remarks, he said, were “an insult to all our efforts to advance the negotiations process”. Netanyahu reiterates terms Just ahead of renewed talks with the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Sunday restated what he said were essential components of a peace agreement, chief among them recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland. Speaking to reporters at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said an agreement would have to be based “first of all on recognition of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people, an end to the conflict and an end to further demands on Israel.” The Palestinians object to endorsing Israel as essentially Jewish, as that would imply that they were dropping their claim that refugees who fled or were expelled when Israel was created in 1948, and their descendants, should be able to reclaim former homes now within Israel. Key to the discussions will be the future of a partial Israeli moratorium on settlement construction in the occupied West Bank.
