Sharon rejects land for peace approach, says aide
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
The Guardian (UK)
Wednesday November 23, 2005
Ariel Sharon no longer regards big compromises over land as being crucial to setting up an independent Palestinian state, says one of the Israeli prime minister's closest political advisers.
The day after Mr Sharon broke from the ruling Likud party to launch a new political movement ahead of a general election on March 28, the adviser, Eyal Arad, said the Israeli leadership had repudiated the central belief of years of negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - that giving up land would buy peace.
Mr Arad, the prime minister's strategic policy adviser who was among those who urged the leader to quit Likud, said that Mr Sharon considered the 1993 Oslo accords, which sought peace based on Israel surrendering the territories occupied in 1967, as failed and discredited. Mr Arad said the Israeli leadership had interpreted the US-led "road map" for peace as laying out an alternative philosophy of "security for independence", meaning a "total end of the terrorist war" in return for a "Palestinian national home" but not necessarily based on the 1967 borders.
Palestinian officials described Mr Arad's view as an attempt to assert that Israel's efforts to impose de facto borders, using the West Bank barrier and settlement expansion, were not jeopardising peace. It was also in line with Mr Sharon's contention that the core of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians was not the occupation but Islamic terrorism.
Mr Arad said: "Since 1967, almost the entire international community and at least half the public in Israel assumed the conflict would be solved based on the formula of territories for peace. It was a naive formula and presupposed that the problem between the Israelis and Palestinians was the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip in 1967 and therefore if you remove the occupation ... the security problem, terrorism, will go away.
"This formula is both false philosophically and naive politically. That's why when it was implemented the Oslo agreement failed ... If you look at the bare statistics, since the Oslo agreement terrorism has increased many many times."
Mr Arad said that after Israel offered territorial compromises, including the division of Jerusalem, the intifada erupted. "The territorial problem was not the root cause of the conflict ... What the Palestinians sought was not really territories that they could control and run in the form of the Camp David proposal. What they really sought was independence.
"The road map replaced the falsehood of [territories for peace] with a much more realistic formula - security for independence. The road map postulates ... total dismantling of all terrorist apparatus in the Palestinian territories by the Palestinians ... What the prime minister says and what the road map says is that before full compliance nothing will happen."
In fact, the road map requires the Palestinian leadership to "undertake visible efforts" to stop attacks and start to dismantle "terrorist capabilities and infrastructure". It also says that a negotiated settlement is to be based on "the principle of land for peace".
The Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said: "They have been trying to say borders are not the issue while they use the [West Bank barrier] to build a border. I hope that ... the Israeli people will elect a government that will shoot for the end game, for a peace treaty and they know that to get that they must withdraw to the '67 borders. There is no other way."
The Guardian (UK)
Wednesday November 23, 2005
Ariel Sharon no longer regards big compromises over land as being crucial to setting up an independent Palestinian state, says one of the Israeli prime minister's closest political advisers.
The day after Mr Sharon broke from the ruling Likud party to launch a new political movement ahead of a general election on March 28, the adviser, Eyal Arad, said the Israeli leadership had repudiated the central belief of years of negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - that giving up land would buy peace.
Mr Arad, the prime minister's strategic policy adviser who was among those who urged the leader to quit Likud, said that Mr Sharon considered the 1993 Oslo accords, which sought peace based on Israel surrendering the territories occupied in 1967, as failed and discredited. Mr Arad said the Israeli leadership had interpreted the US-led "road map" for peace as laying out an alternative philosophy of "security for independence", meaning a "total end of the terrorist war" in return for a "Palestinian national home" but not necessarily based on the 1967 borders.
Palestinian officials described Mr Arad's view as an attempt to assert that Israel's efforts to impose de facto borders, using the West Bank barrier and settlement expansion, were not jeopardising peace. It was also in line with Mr Sharon's contention that the core of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians was not the occupation but Islamic terrorism.
Mr Arad said: "Since 1967, almost the entire international community and at least half the public in Israel assumed the conflict would be solved based on the formula of territories for peace. It was a naive formula and presupposed that the problem between the Israelis and Palestinians was the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip in 1967 and therefore if you remove the occupation ... the security problem, terrorism, will go away.
"This formula is both false philosophically and naive politically. That's why when it was implemented the Oslo agreement failed ... If you look at the bare statistics, since the Oslo agreement terrorism has increased many many times."
Mr Arad said that after Israel offered territorial compromises, including the division of Jerusalem, the intifada erupted. "The territorial problem was not the root cause of the conflict ... What the Palestinians sought was not really territories that they could control and run in the form of the Camp David proposal. What they really sought was independence.
"The road map replaced the falsehood of [territories for peace] with a much more realistic formula - security for independence. The road map postulates ... total dismantling of all terrorist apparatus in the Palestinian territories by the Palestinians ... What the prime minister says and what the road map says is that before full compliance nothing will happen."
In fact, the road map requires the Palestinian leadership to "undertake visible efforts" to stop attacks and start to dismantle "terrorist capabilities and infrastructure". It also says that a negotiated settlement is to be based on "the principle of land for peace".
The Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said: "They have been trying to say borders are not the issue while they use the [West Bank barrier] to build a border. I hope that ... the Israeli people will elect a government that will shoot for the end game, for a peace treaty and they know that to get that they must withdraw to the '67 borders. There is no other way."
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