President Mahmoud Abbas and his guest, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, agreed Saturday that regardless of the developments in the region, the Palestinian question remains the main issue and resolving it would contribute to peace and stability.Which means that Fabius' understanding of international law is as tenuous as his grasp of the Middle East.
Abbas said after meeting Fabius that when he saw an opportunity to resume negotiations with Israel, he grabbed it without paying too much attention to what is going on in the region.
“When there was an opportunity to resume negotiations, we took it without looking at what was going on around us,” he said.
Fabius agreed that the opportunity of reaching a final peaceful settlement between the Palestinians and Israel is going to contribute positively to stability in the region.
“It is very important to move forward with negotiations because this will be great for peace and stability in the region,” he said.
‘The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains the main issue and therefore it should be resolved peacefully,” he added.
He warned however that unless the negotiations move forward, the developments in the Arab countries could become an obstacle in their way.
He also described the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as “illegal under international law.”
(Even if you believe that the WB is occupied, and even if you twist Geneva to be understood as if Jews building communities there were violating Geneva, it doesn't make the communities themselves illegal. Calling them illegal means that under international law, they must be dismantled and hundreds of thousands of Jews, including a significant number who were born in the area, must be ethnically cleansed. And no one, even the most anti-Israel legal scholar, seriously interprets international law that way. See this video starting at about 39:00.)
Here is a recent cartoon I saw on Twitter that shows the same mentality as Mr. Fabius:
