In an interview with the Jerusalem Post published on Friday, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman claimed it would be impossible “to resolve any problem in our region without resolving the Iranian problem.”

He added that the biggest obstacle to any comprehensive solution “is not Israel, it is not the Palestinians. It’s the Iranians.”
Lieberman also said the real reason for the deadlock with the Palestinians “is not occupation, not settlements, and not settlers.”
In a sign of his inconsistency, earlier this month Lieberman had suggested that instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan was the greatest threat to regional and world peace.
However, it seems the Israeli establishment must have told Lieberman to return to his Iran-bashing rhetoric.
If the new Israeli foreign minister, who himself lives in a West Bank settlement, is right, then UN resolutions 242 and 338 -- which state that Israel must withdraw from the Palestinian territories it occupied in the Six-Day War of 1967 and which were approved before the Islamic Revolution of Iran -- are meaningless, and Israel should have been able to make a peace deal with the Palestinians before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
It is true that Iran has offered moral support to the Palestinians, and it could even be said that Iran has encouraged them to resist the occupation.
But at the end of the day, have Arab governments or the Palestinian Authority gained anything during all the negotiations with the Israelis over the years?
Hamas and Islamic Jihad are called ‘radical’ and the Fatah faction is called ‘moderate’; but has Israel given any concessions to Fatah that its ‘moderates’ could cite to convince the ‘radical groups’ that the Israelis are negotiating in good faith and that dialogue is the path for regaining the lost territories?
Is there any evidence showing that Israel was ready to return any of the occupied territories to the Arabs but Iran prevented this from occurring, or that the Palestinians and the Israelis were about to sign a peace treaty but then Iran killed the deal?
Nowadays, the Arabs are more pessimistic about dialogue than at any other time, since the new Israeli cabinet is not even ready to talk with ‘moderate’ Palestinian leaders.
The Saudi Arabian peace initiative, which has been endorsed by the 27-member Arab League, states that Arab countries are ready to normalize ties with Israel if it withdraws from Arab territories it has occupied.
This is the clearest proof that the occupation is the only source of the conflict, contrary to Lieberman’s nonsensical statements.
It seems that the Israelis have never been interested in making peace with the Arabs. If they truly sought peace, they would have allowed Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland and would not have carried out such a barbaric attack on Gaza in the December 2008-January 2009 war.
The occupation of Arab territories is the first and foremost root cause of the Middle East conflict. The Palestinians and other Arabs only want their land back, and Iran is not an impediment to peace.