ISRAELI PRIME minister Binyamin Netanyahu has described as “distressing” remarks by former US president Bill Clinton that Russian immigrants to Israel were a main obstacle to achieving Middle East peace.
The former president made his comments in a roundtable discussion with reporters during his Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York. “An increasing number of the young people in the Israel Defence Forces are the children of Russians and settlers, the hardest-core people against a division of the land. This presents a staggering problem,” he said. “It’s a different Israel; 16 per cent of Israelis speak Russian.”
According to Mr Clinton, the Russian immigrant population in Israel was the group least interested in a deal with Palestinians.
“They’ve just got there, it’s their country, they’ve made a commitment to the future there,” Mr Clinton said. “They can’t imagine any historical or other claims that would justify dividing it.”
Most of the one million Russian speakers in Israel arrived in the 1990s, and they comprise about 15 per cent of the country’s population. Surveys have found most of them to be on the right of the political spectrum and wary about making territorial concessions to the Palestinians.
Mr Netanyahu expressed regret over the comments.
“As an old friend of Israel, Clinton must know that immigrants from the former Soviet Union have made a huge contribution to the strengthening and development of Israel and the Israel Defence Forces,” he said.
Yisrael Beiteinu, a party composed mainly of Russian immigrants and headed by hardline foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, himself a former immigrant from Moldova, condemned Mr Clinton’s comments as crude generalisations. “It seems that Clinton has forgotten that it was former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat who refused his peace offer, which included unbearable concessions on the part of Israel,” noted a statement released by the party.
Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish-American pressure group, described Mr Clinton’s comments as “simplistic, amateur analysis”.
Zeev Chanin, a senior political science lecturer at Ben-Gurion university and an expert on Israel’s Russian speakers, said Mr Clinton’s comments were out of date, and today the views of the Russian-speaking electorate in Israel was similar to the rest of the country.
Dr Chanin said about one-quarter of Russian immigrants were right-wing, about 12 per cent leftists and the rest best classified as centre-right.