Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to Secretary of State John Kerry's speech on Wednesday by saying that he was "deeply disappointed" in his remarks.
Kerry delivered a speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and defended the Obama administration's decision to not veto a United Nations resolution that condemned Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The administration's choice to abstain from the vote broke with decades of U.S. policy to support the Jewish state in the U.N. against what some call anti-Israel measures.
"I must stress my deep disappointment with the speech today of John Kerry," Netanyahu said. "A speech that was almost as unbalanced as the anti-Israel resolution passed at the U.N. last week. A speech ostensibly about peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Secretary Kerry paid lip service to the unremitting campaign of terrorism that has been waged by the Palestinians against the Jewish state for nearly a century."
"What he did was to spend most of his speech blaming Israel for the lack of peace by passionately condemning a policy of enabling Jews to live in their historic homeland and in their eternal capital, Jerusalem," Netanyahu continued.
"Hundreds of suicide bombings, thousands, tens of thousands of rockets, millions of Israelis in bomb shelters are not throw away lines in a speech," the Israel prime minister added. "They are the realities of the people of Israel that they had to endure because of mistaken policies, policies that at the time won the thunderous applause of the world."
Netanyahu said that he hoped the U.S. Congress and President-elect Donald Trump would work with Israel to mitigate some of the damage that the U.N. resolution has done and ultimately repeal it.
"I wish I could be comforted by the promise that the U.S. says we will not bring any more resolutions to the U.N., [but] that's what they said about this previous resolution," Netanyahu said. "We have it on absolutely incontestable evidence that the United States organized, advanced, and brought this resolution to the United Nations Security Council."