JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Thursday backed off his pre-election declaration that no Palestinian state would be established on his watch and said he had not been trying to suppress the votes of Arab citizens with an Election Day video warning that those citizens were heading to polling stations in large numbers.
Netanyahu said Thursday on MSNBC that he still wanted "a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that he had not intended to reverse the position he took endorsing that in a 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
"I haven't changed my policy," Netanyahu said in the interview, his first since his election victory this week, which handed him a fourth term. "What has changed is the reality."
Netanyahu said the Palestinian leadership's refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and that leadership's pact with the militant Hamas movement made an agreement impossible right now.
"I don't want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change," he said. "I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace."
Severing ties with Hamas, which Israel and the U.S. consider a terrorist group, is a necessary first step for any negotiations, Netanyahu said.
"You have to get the international community to press on the Palestinians to go back to -- go back on their unity pact with the terrorist Hamas and come back to the table," Netanyahu said in an interview on Fox News.
The White House and European leaders had expressed alarm over Netanyahu's pre-election statement, on the eve of what had seemed like a close race, that there would never be a Palestinian state as long as he remained in office.
Officials in President Barack Obama's administration said Wednesday that in light of that statement, they would consider supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state roughly along the lines that divided Israel from the West Bank and Gaza before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
On Thursday, the White House reiterated that Netanyahu's backing away from support for a two-state solution has "consequences for actions that we take at the United Nations and other places."
"The United States has repeatedly intervened in some of those debates at the U.N. and in other places by saying ... the best way for us to solve this problem is to get the two parties to sit down at the negotiating table, resolve their differences so that this two-state solution can be realized," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
Earlier on Thursday, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority had seized on Netanyahu's original repudiation of a two-state solution to say he would continue his strategy of seeking full U.N. recognition and using the International Criminal Court to press war-crimes charges against Israelis.
"If these things are true, it means that the Israeli government has no serious intentions to reach a peace agreement that will create two states based on the 1967 borders," Abbas said at a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization's executive committee in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "We therefore will not retreat from our position to apply international law, and so it is our right to go anywhere in the world to realize our rights according to international law."
The executive committee also denounced Netanyahu's comments in a video Tuesday about Arab citizens voting "in droves." A White House spokesman Wednesday called the comment "deeply concerning," "divisive" and an attempt to "marginalize Arab citizens."
In the interview Thursday on MSNBC, Netanyahu sought to explain those statements, saying, "I'm very proud to be prime minister of all of Israel's citizens, Arabs and Jews alike."
He said his concern had been a "massive foreign-funded effort" to bus Arabs to polling places in order to oust him from office.
"I wasn't trying to suppress a vote," he said. "I was trying to get something to counter a foreign-funded effort to get votes that are intended to topple my party, and I was calling on our voters to come out."
Netanyahu added that he was proud that his Likud Party had won some votes in Arab towns. "I'm very proud of the fact that Israel is the one country in a very broad radius in which Arabs have free and fair elections. That's sacrosanct," he said. "That will never change."
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, Thursday denounced the Election Day video, echoing the anger expressed by Arab-Israeli lawmakers, American Jewish leaders and European officials in the past three days.
"Today's magic in Israel is how to export fear," Erekat said. "Arabs are busing! Imagine if somebody stands in the French elections and says, 'Jews are busing!' Where are we living? This is happening in 2015!"
Concerns remain
In Washington on Thursday, Earnest suggested that Netanyahu's MSNBC remarks had done nothing to ease the administration's concerns.
Earnest said he was "not suggesting that any policy decisions have been made at this point." But he maintained that Netanyahu's comments before the election demonstrated that the Israeli government was "no longer committed to a two-state solution," regardless of what the prime minister said later.
White House officials noted that a two-state solution has been supported by Republican and Democratic presidents and by members of both parties in Congress, most recently in a unanimous House resolution late last year.
"This is not a situation where the prime minister is creating some daylight between himself and President Obama," Earnest said. "It's a situation where he's creating distance between himself and every American president, Democrat and Republican."
Despite the tensions, Obama called Thursday to congratulate Netanyahu on his election victory.
The White House said in a statement that Obama stressed the United States' close security cooperation with Israel but also emphasized the U.S. commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state.
On another sensitive subject, Obama addressed negotiations with Iran over Tehran's nuclear program and said he was focused on a deal that would prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, the White House said. Earnest did not say how Netanyahu responded.
Information for this article was contributed by Jodi Rudoren and Michael D. Shear of The New York Times; by Jim Kuhnhenn, Josh Lederman, Alan Fram and staff members of The Associated Press; and by David Lauter and Maher Abukhater of Tribune News Service.
A Section on 03/20/2015