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Mideast summit with Bush takes shape
Sharon says he is determined to reach peace deal, end occupation
Agencies, Jordan Times, 5/27/03
ARIEL SHARON told his stunned country Monday he was determined to reach a peace deal and end 36 years of rule over the Palestinians — the strongest sign yet that the prime minister's endorsement of the Mideast peace roadmap may have been more than a ploy to deflect international pressure.
Meanwhile, Israel's qualified acceptance of the roadmap boosted US President George W. Bush's chances of holding a peace summit, which Israel said would take place in Jordan.
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Monday in Crete that a three-way summit between Sharon, Abbas and Bush could take place in Jordan. Senior Jordanian officials stressed that nothing had been decided yet.
Also Monday, Israeli occupation forces killed two Palestinians and an Israeli soldier was lightly wounded as resistance fighters from Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades carried out a gun and grenade attack on a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, military sources said.
In the West Bank, Israeli troops demolished the family homes of the two Palestinian bombers who killed seven other people when they blew themselves up in Jerusalem earlier this month.
As to Monday's most prominent development, Sharon's speech marked the first time the veteran hawk, who had long argued that a Palestinian state would pose a mortal danger to Israel, publicly used the word “occupation” to refer to Israel's presence in West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“To keep 3.5 million people under occupation is bad for us and them,” he told angry hawks in his Likud Party in remarks broadcast on Israel Radio. The term “occupation” is anathema to the Israeli right, which believes Israel has a legitimate claim to the West Bank and Gaza for religious and security reasons.
“Today 1.8 million Palestinians are supported by international economic organisations. Do you want to take that on yourselves? Medicine, health and education?,” Sharon asked the rebellious Likud members.
Palestinians want to regain all of the West Bank and Gaza for a state.
On Sunday, Sharon's Cabinet conditionally approved the “roadmap,” a three-phase plane that begins with a halt to violence and envisages a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2005.
Answering party critics on Monday, Sharon said he was committed to finding a political solution to the conflict.
“This can't continue endlessly. Do you want to stay forever in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem? That is not right,” he told his party's lawmakers, listing main West Bank towns, and vowing to reach a political agreement even if he fought alone
Officials began preparing Monday for a meeting in the coming days between Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, their second in 10 days. That could clear the way for a summit with US President George W. Bush as early as next week, possibly in Jordan (see separate story).
Sharon faced withering criticism from Likud members, who charged that the roadmap was slanted in favour of the Palestinians and endangers Israel.
Yuval Steinitz, a leading Likud member, said Sharon ignored the negative aspects of the plan. “I think that Arik (Sharon) is very uncomfortable with the roadmap,” Steinitz told the Associated Press, but Sharon was unable to withstand international pressure to endorse it.
In his remarks Monday, Sharon left himself a way out of going forward with the plan.
“What will happen if Palestinian terror continues? Nothing. Nothing will happen. The Palestinians will get nothing,” he told the lawmakers.
Critics have said Sharon's long-held condition that all violence must stop before peace moves is unrealistic and guarantees a continuing stalemate.
Two Palestinians killed
In violence Monday, Israeli occupation troops killed a Palestinian teenager and another surrendered after infiltrating from Gaza, the military said. They were unarmed and apparently looking for work.
In a village near the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, an 11-year-old Palestinian boy was killed during “an exchange of gunfire” with Israeli troops, Israel Radio reported.
The latest deaths raise to 3,264 the number of people killed since the September 2000 launch of the Palestinian Intifada, according to an AFP count.
The total includes 2,462 Palestinians and 742 Israelis.
The Cabinet's approval of the roadmap plan, coupled with a list of conditions, was carefully worded to allow Israel to wriggle out from under some of the measures that are toughest for Sharon's government to accept.
Palestinians, who already accepted the plan, insisted it must be implemented unchanged. Some officials said Sharon's new visage is just a ploy.
The remarks, following Sharon's reluctant embrace of the peace plan, pointed to a stunning turnaround for the hawkish ex-general known as “the bulldozer” for ramming West Bank settlement programmes through successive Cabinets.
He once argued that giving the Palestinians back even 13 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza would endanger Israel's security.
Some believe he has truly changed his beliefs. “Often he says to me, `Ten years ago I wouldn't do this or say this',” political analyst Shimon Shiffer wrote in the daily Yediot Ahronot. “He reached the realisation that at the age of 75, he's the man that finds himself at this intersection, that he and only he can do this.”
Others said Sharon had never been a true ideologue of the right.
“Sharon is a pragmatist,” said Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Centre§ for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv's Bar Ilan University. “He is capable of change when circumstances require.”
Liberal lawmaker Yossi Sarid argued Sharon was trying to keep his intentions murky so the US government could assume he was committed to the plan, while his hawkish allies could assume he was just making a tactical move to end US pressure, while believing the plan will fail before Israel has to make any hard choices.
“Ariel Sharon likes to walk in the fog, because then no one knows where he is headed,” Sarid wrote in the Yediot daily.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |