Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman warns that the biggest challenge Israel was face in 2015 will come by way of Europe and not the Palestinians. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – The biggest diplomatic challenge Israel faces in 2015 will be Europe’s view of Israeli policies, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Sunday during a meeting with the Israeli envoys to the European Union.

Lieberman was quoted by Israel’s Channel 2 as saying, “I’m not sure devoting so much time to the Palestinian issue is in Israel’s best interest. … If I have to analyze all the challenges we face, I would have to say that our biggest diplomatic challenge is not the Palestinians or the Arab nations, but the West.”

Lieberman leveled harsh criticism at the support lent by the European Union to the Palestinian Authority’s unilateral moves in the international arena—especially the decision of several U.N. Security Council members, including France and Luxemburg, to back a Palestinian resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank by 2017.

“Some European nations’ conduct is reminiscent of 1938, just before the Munich Agreement,” Lieberman said, evoking the deal negotiated between European powers and Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II. “The conduct by countries like Sweden and Ireland (who both recently supported unilateral Palestinian statehood, Sweden on the government level and Ireland in its legislature) is reminiscent of how [European powers] abandoned Czechoslovakia to its fate. Now they are making all kinds of excuses to abandon Israel, even though we are the only country in the Middle East to represent Western values.”