Ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman has been Israel's foreign minister for a week, and his blunt, undiplomatic style already is threatening to overshadow the new government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In seven days, Lieberman has declared the death of 16-month-old U.S.-sponsored peace talks with the Palestinians and said that those who want peace must prepare for war. He's dismissed Egyptian threats to bar him from visiting one of Israel's few Arab allies until he apologizes for incendiary comments he made last fall about President Hosni Mubarak. And he's vowed to beat a deepening political-corruption investigation by Israeli police, who have questioned him three times since he took office.
`GIVE US TIME'
In an interview Tuesday with McClatchy Newspapers, Lieberman took more care with his words, saying that peace talks with the Palestinians are ''deadlocked'' and that the Obama administration shouldn't expect the new Israeli government to rush into new negotiations.
''We don't expect anyone to stand over us with a stopwatch,'' Lieberman said. ``Give us time to get organized and put together new ideas.''
Lieberman said it was impossible to resume talks on creating an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel that then-President George W. Bush launched in Annapolis, Md., in 2007 and President Barack Obama pointedly endorsed this week in Turkey.
''The situation is deadlocked, and it is not because of us,'' Lieberman said.
Lieberman said he planned to present that message next week to former Sen. George Mitchell, Obama's special Mideast envoy, who will return to Jerusalem on Monday for the first time since the new, center-right Israeli coalition government took power.
While Lieberman said he backed the principle of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, his deputy foreign minister said the new government had no plans to move quickly on one of the most pivotal requirements in the American-backed ''road map'' for peace: immediately freezing the construction or expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
LONG-STANDING VIEW
Instead, echoing a long-standing and disputed Israeli interpretation of the road map, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon indicated that Palestinians would have to crack down harder on attacks against Israelis before Israel would freeze settlement construction or expansion in the West Bank, which Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War.
''We should move forward as much as possible together,'' Ayalon told McClatchy. ``But you cannot isolate one issue from another.''
Lieberman's unapologetic style already is generating angst among pragmatists within the Israeli government, and with a cross section of international leaders and political analysts.
''What is clear is that he is out there to destroy the last possibility of the two-state solution, and that's why I think, in many ways, he's an enemy of the state,'' said Neve Gordon, a political science professor at Israel's Ben-Gurion University.
``Because if we don't have a two-state solution, it's full-blown apartheid.''
Front Page Features