President Shimon Peres admitted to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that the Oslo peace process he helped initiate was based on a mistaken premise, according to an April 2007 cable of a conversation Netanyahu had with US Congressman Gary Ackerman, the Wikileaks website revealed Monday.
Netanyahu was opposition leader at the time and Peres was vice premier.
"Netanyahu commented that Shimon Peres had admitted to him that the Oslo process had been based on a mistaken economic premise, and as a result European and US assistance to the Palestinians had gone to create a bloated bureaucracy, with PA employees looking to the international community to meet their payroll," Ackerman reported in a document first revealed by Channel 10 reporter Nadav Eyal.
In the same conversation with Ackerman, Netanyahu called Kadima a "fake party" and former prime minister Ehud Olmert's approach in the Second Lebanon War a year earlier "stupid." Kadima blasted Netanyahu, who took pride in being a statesmanlike opposition leader, for airing the government's dirty laundry to leaders overseas.
"Netanyahu put his political interests above those of the nation," Kadima MK Yoel Hason said. "Wikileaks exposed the tip of the iceberg of Netanyahu's empty leadership."
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