Israel approves peace referendum bill
Government approves bill stating that any peace treaty reached with Palestinians would be put to a referendum.
The Israeli government has approved a bill to submit any peace treaty with the Palestinians to a referendum, a statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said.
“Any agreement which may be reached in negotiations will be put to a referendum,” it quoted him as saying on Sunday.
“It is important that on such historic decisions every citizen should vote directly on an issue deciding the country’s future.”
The decision comes a day after Netanyahu said that Israel would free 104 Palestinian prisoners to coincide with the resumption of long-stalled peace talks.
“I agreed to free 104 Palestinians in stages, after the start of negotiations and according to progress,” he wrote on his official Facebook page on Saturday evening.
A Palestinian official told AFP news agency on Saturday that a US-brokered renewal of negotiations, stalled since September 2010, would open in Washington on Tuesday.
There has so far been no official confirmation.
Future Palestinian state
A cabinet briefing paper said the government saw the referendum bill as “urgent and important” and said it would be asking parliament to fast-track its passage into law.
Israeli media said that it could go before the house for a first reading this week.
If adopted, a referendum would be a final endorsement of a treaty after ratification by the government and parliament.
The draft is seen as a gesture to rightwing ministers apprehensive of concessions that could be demanded of Israel in the talks.
It would oblige a referendum in cases where territory over which Israel claims sovereignty is ceded in a peace agreement or by a cabinet decision.
That would include any part of mainly-Arab East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed in a move never recognised by the international community.
The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
Israel rules out ceding sovereignty over any part of what it calls its “eternal and indivisible capital”.