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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Israel Gives Palestinians Deal Deadline |
| 2006-05-10 |
| EFL Israel on Wednesday gave the Palestinians until the end of the year to prove they are willing to negotiate a final peace deal, or prepare for the Israeli government to unilaterally set final borders by 2008, said Justice Minister Haim Ramon, a close associated of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. "Through the end of this year, 2006, there will be honest attempts to talk to the other side. If it becomes clear by the end of the year that we really have no partner, and the international community is also convinced of this, then we will take our fate into our own hands and not leave our fate in the hands of our enemies," he told Israel's Army radio. Ramon was the first Israeli official to set a deadline for the Palestinians' militant Hamas government to renounce violence and recognize the Jewish state. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, of the rival Fatah party, has tried to persuade Israel to bypass Hamas and talk peace with him, but Olmert has said he wouldn't negotiate with Abbas if the group didn't change its violent ways. Olmert, who was a major force behind Israel's Gaza Strip withdrawal last year, has said he intends to pull Jewish settlers out of heavily populated Palestinian areas in the West Bank while fortifying major settlement blocs and retaining the West Bank's Jordan River Valley. He has said Israel prefers to negotiate, but would act on its own if Hamas didn't moderate. "If we wait a month, two months, three months, half a year and we don't see any change, then most likely we are going to move forward even without an agreement, without negotiations, in order to define the border lines which are acceptable for Israel," Olmert told an international conference of mayors on Tuesday. Olmert originally had set a 2010 deadline for the pullback, but a top aide said last month that Israel planned to conclude the process before the end of President Bush's term in 2008. Ramon said it wouldn't take more than 18 to 24 months. "I would like to believe that by the end of 2008 we will be deployed on a line that will signify Israel's final borders and guarantee our existence here as a Jewish democratic state." The borders, he said, "will first and foremost include the settlement blocs and the regions that are necessary for our security." Palestinian government spokesman Ghazi Hamad said that Hamas was prepared to grant a long-term truce if Israel would agree to retreat to the lines it held before the 1967 Mideast war - a condition Israel categorically rejects. International Mideast peacemakers, including the U.S., haven't rejected the notion of unilateral Israeli moves in the West Bank, but say Israel can't draw its final borders on its own. |
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