Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Monday that Israel will not make concessions to the Palestinians as part of any normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, as has been demanded by Riyadh and Washington as part of a potential agreement.
“We will not make any concessions to the Palestinians. It’s a fiction,” Smotrich, who heads the far-right Religious Zionism party, told Army Radio.
Smotrich said that while Israel is interested in the US-brokered deal with Riyadh, “it has nothing to do with Judea and Samaria,” referring to the West Bank by its biblical names.
Smotrich is a staunch opponent of the establishment of a Palestinian state and sees his control of the Civil Administration, which he holds as part of his additional ministerial role in the Defense Ministry, as a means of extending Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank through replacing the military administration of the territory with direct control by the central government and its ministries.
Last week, it was reported that Smotrich was hastily pushing through a plan to expand West Bank settlements and legalize dozens of outposts, in the wake of a series of deadly terror attacks.
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