Roadmap and PeacemakingIsrael and Palestine
What starts the numerous peacemaking efforts? What brings them to a halt? Are they doomed to fail because the problem is intractable? Or are some peacemaking plans simply unrealistic? With one-sided conditions and expectations?
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Gaza in Palestine has come to symbolise the imposition of great power on the powerless ...99% of children traumatized [check Iraq!],
Imprisoning a whole nation | By John Pilger
John Pilger describes how Gaza in Palestine has come to symbolise the imposition of great power on the powerless, in the Middle East and all over the world, and how a vocabulary of double standard is employed to justify this epic tragedy.
05/23/07 "ICH" -- -- -Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.
"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack]..." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children".
Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative", in the words of a former CIA official.
Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.
With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today..." ...
...
More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper's wound". A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.
I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children's community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed." ...
Imprisoning a whole nation | By John Pilger
John Pilger describes how Gaza in Palestine has come to symbolise the imposition of great power on the powerless, in the Middle East and all over the world, and how a vocabulary of double standard is employed to justify this epic tragedy.
05/23/07 "ICH" -- -- -Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.
"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack]..." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children".
Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative", in the words of a former CIA official.
Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.
With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today..." ...
...
More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper's wound". A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.
I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children's community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed." ...
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Israeli PM: "I believe, I hope and I pray that we will continue to work together to reinforce Jerusalem in order to extend its boundaries."
Israel marks 40 year rule of Arab east Jerusalem | by Jacques Pinto Mon May 14, 11:18 AM ET | JERUSALEM (AFP)
Israel on Monday began marking 40 years since it conquered and annexed Arab east Jerusalem but the ceremonies were boycotted by European and US diplomats.
"The last 40 years were only the beginning," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a special parliamentary session marking the anniversary according to the Hebrew calendar.
"I believe, I hope and I pray that we will continue to work together to reinforce Jerusalem in order to extend its boundaries."
Olmert's government on Sunday approved one and a half billion dollars to develop Israeli areas of Jerusalem and during Monday's parliamentary session the prime minister outlined the spending plans. ...
...
A statement from a group of Israeli left-wing groups issued a statement deploring the "deliberate marginalisation of Palestinian districts in Jerusalem by the Israeli authorities (for) 40 years."
Palestinians are determined to make east Jerusalem, which includes the walled Old City and its holy sites, the capital of a promised future state.
An Israeli research institute reported last week that while the number of Jewish residents grew 140 percent to 475,000 over the last 40 years, the city's Arab population has grown far more quickly, by 257 percent to 245,000. ...
Israel marks 40 year rule of Arab east Jerusalem | by Jacques Pinto Mon May 14, 11:18 AM ET | JERUSALEM (AFP)
Israel on Monday began marking 40 years since it conquered and annexed Arab east Jerusalem but the ceremonies were boycotted by European and US diplomats.
"The last 40 years were only the beginning," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a special parliamentary session marking the anniversary according to the Hebrew calendar.
"I believe, I hope and I pray that we will continue to work together to reinforce Jerusalem in order to extend its boundaries."
Olmert's government on Sunday approved one and a half billion dollars to develop Israeli areas of Jerusalem and during Monday's parliamentary session the prime minister outlined the spending plans. ...
...
A statement from a group of Israeli left-wing groups issued a statement deploring the "deliberate marginalisation of Palestinian districts in Jerusalem by the Israeli authorities (for) 40 years."
Palestinians are determined to make east Jerusalem, which includes the walled Old City and its holy sites, the capital of a promised future state.
An Israeli research institute reported last week that while the number of Jewish residents grew 140 percent to 475,000 over the last 40 years, the city's Arab population has grown far more quickly, by 257 percent to 245,000. ...
Palestine/Israel is as unpartitionable as was South Africa and Northern Ireland, ...
A political marriage of necessity: a single state of Palestine-IsraelThe case of South Africa shows that a unity government can succeed. | By Ali Abunimah
05/15/07 "ICH " -- -- As Israel celebrates 59 years of independence, Palestinians on May 14 commemorate the Nakba, the catastrophe of expulsion and decades of exile that continue to this day.
...
My mother remembers her early childhood and the Jewish neighbors who rented the apartment her father owned. She recalls helping them on the Sabbath and playing with their daughter after school. A life such as this is no more than a distant memory for most Palestinian refugees, who, with their descendants, now number more than 5 million.
...
But a better life needn't be just a memory. It is feasible for Palestinians to return to their homeland while peace with Israelis is built at the same time. Another diplomatic push will not bring about the fantasy of neat separation of Israelis and Palestinians into two states. This would only perpetuate inequality and division. Instead, international pressure should be put on Israel to drop its insistence on supremacy over Palestinians. Then both parties can come together to begin building a single, multiethnic state where Jews and Palestinians can again live side by side.
One of the hard – but not impossible – tasks will be convincing many Israelis of the viability of a single-state solution. In 2004, for example, Israeli historian Benny Morris, who has written several books documenting the forced expulsion of the Palestinians, said that a "Jewish state would not have come into existence without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them." But Mr. Morris is no bleeding heart. He added, "There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing." If Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, could be faulted, Morris said, it was because he "did not complete the transfer in 1948."
Millions of Palestinians live in squalid camps under Israeli military rule and in surrounding countries. Israel has refused to allow these refugees to return home as required by international law.
The reason is simple: From its inception, the Zionist movement set out to turn a country where the vast majority of people were not Jewish into a country that gives special rights and privileges to Jews at the expense of non-Jews. If Palestinian refugees were black Africans, no one would dispute an "apartheid" label that former US president Jimmy Carter has used to describe the situation.
...
To assert, as Israel does, that it has a right to be a "Jewish state" means to recognize that it has a right to manipulate demographics for the purpose of ethnic domination. This outlook violates fundamental human rights.
...
Palestine/Israel is as unpartitionable as was South Africa and Northern Ireland, where similar ethnic conflicts had also defied resolution for generations. In both places, it was only when the dominant group dropped its insistence on supremacy that a political settlement could be reached. What was once unimaginable happened: Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and F.W. de Klerk's National Party joined hands in a national unity government in 1994. Leaders in Northern Ireland made similar progress this year.
Neither political marriage came about through love, but through necessity and with outside pressure. In time, social reconciliation may come, but it has not been the prerequisite for political progress in South Africa or Northern Ireland. Such pressure on Israel as the strongest party is necessary, which is why I support the growing movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions modeled on the antiapartheid campaign. At the same time, we must begin to construct a vision of a nonracial, nonsectarian Palestine-Israel, which belongs to all the people who live in it, Israeli Jews, Palestinians, and all exiles who want to return and live in peace with their neighbors. ...
A political marriage of necessity: a single state of Palestine-IsraelThe case of South Africa shows that a unity government can succeed. | By Ali Abunimah
05/15/07 "ICH " -- -- As Israel celebrates 59 years of independence, Palestinians on May 14 commemorate the Nakba, the catastrophe of expulsion and decades of exile that continue to this day.
...
My mother remembers her early childhood and the Jewish neighbors who rented the apartment her father owned. She recalls helping them on the Sabbath and playing with their daughter after school. A life such as this is no more than a distant memory for most Palestinian refugees, who, with their descendants, now number more than 5 million.
...
But a better life needn't be just a memory. It is feasible for Palestinians to return to their homeland while peace with Israelis is built at the same time. Another diplomatic push will not bring about the fantasy of neat separation of Israelis and Palestinians into two states. This would only perpetuate inequality and division. Instead, international pressure should be put on Israel to drop its insistence on supremacy over Palestinians. Then both parties can come together to begin building a single, multiethnic state where Jews and Palestinians can again live side by side.
One of the hard – but not impossible – tasks will be convincing many Israelis of the viability of a single-state solution. In 2004, for example, Israeli historian Benny Morris, who has written several books documenting the forced expulsion of the Palestinians, said that a "Jewish state would not have come into existence without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them." But Mr. Morris is no bleeding heart. He added, "There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing." If Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, could be faulted, Morris said, it was because he "did not complete the transfer in 1948."
Millions of Palestinians live in squalid camps under Israeli military rule and in surrounding countries. Israel has refused to allow these refugees to return home as required by international law.
The reason is simple: From its inception, the Zionist movement set out to turn a country where the vast majority of people were not Jewish into a country that gives special rights and privileges to Jews at the expense of non-Jews. If Palestinian refugees were black Africans, no one would dispute an "apartheid" label that former US president Jimmy Carter has used to describe the situation.
...
To assert, as Israel does, that it has a right to be a "Jewish state" means to recognize that it has a right to manipulate demographics for the purpose of ethnic domination. This outlook violates fundamental human rights.
...
Palestine/Israel is as unpartitionable as was South Africa and Northern Ireland, where similar ethnic conflicts had also defied resolution for generations. In both places, it was only when the dominant group dropped its insistence on supremacy that a political settlement could be reached. What was once unimaginable happened: Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and F.W. de Klerk's National Party joined hands in a national unity government in 1994. Leaders in Northern Ireland made similar progress this year.
Neither political marriage came about through love, but through necessity and with outside pressure. In time, social reconciliation may come, but it has not been the prerequisite for political progress in South Africa or Northern Ireland. Such pressure on Israel as the strongest party is necessary, which is why I support the growing movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions modeled on the antiapartheid campaign. At the same time, we must begin to construct a vision of a nonracial, nonsectarian Palestine-Israel, which belongs to all the people who live in it, Israeli Jews, Palestinians, and all exiles who want to return and live in peace with their neighbors. ...
It’s time for the UN to lead Middle East peace drive ... seems that the U.S. cannot handle this alone
It’s time for the UN to lead Middle East peace drive | By Karima Saifullah
Next month, the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip will mark 40 years of living under foreign military rule. The anniversary of Israel’s occupation raises an old but serious question: where is the final peace deal that could end the suffering of the Palestinians?
...
The Palestinians cannot wait for ever. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a crucial impact on global stability. The time has come for the United Nations and other world powers to join forces and end Washington’s near-monopoly over Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy for most of the past 40 years.
It’s time for the UN to lead Middle East peace drive | By Karima Saifullah
Next month, the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip will mark 40 years of living under foreign military rule. The anniversary of Israel’s occupation raises an old but serious question: where is the final peace deal that could end the suffering of the Palestinians?
...
The Palestinians cannot wait for ever. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a crucial impact on global stability. The time has come for the United Nations and other world powers to join forces and end Washington’s near-monopoly over Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy for most of the past 40 years.
The last time the U.S. carried out any serious final-status diplomacy was the last-ditch effort that president Clinton launched in late 2000. But it was late, and it failed. For his part, President Bush has always been very reluctant to push for final-status peace talks that the Palestinians, and most Israelis, want.
...
Settlers, now a minority in the disputed city, appropriate huge quantities of land and water that it is hard to imagine how any independent Palestinian state could be established on the territories that Israel has not (yet) taken.
..
Of course, huge obstacles are hard to overcome. But right now, it seems that the U.S. cannot handle this alone. Not even with the help of the so-called peace Quartet that has been supporting all Washington’s proposals since 2002.
This is why it’s the right time for the UN to intervene. Global stability can no longer wait until the Israeli settlers realize all their dreams. (Source: Aljazeera.com)
Israel stretches to the border with Jordan. It is as if the Palestinians don't exist. ...
Huge gulf in Mid-East narratives By Claire Bolderson BBC News, Tel Aviv
If you watch the introductory video at Tel Aviv's Independence Hall Museum you will hear barely a mention of the Arabs who lived in Palestine before Israel became a state.
If you look at a map in an Israeli school text book you are unlikely to find the Green Line, the ceasefire line which until 1967 separated Israel from the Palestinian territories.
Israel stretches to the border with Jordan. It is as if the Palestinians don't exist.
And you won't find the word "Nakba", the "disaster", as Arabs call what befell the Palestinian people when the Israeli state was created in 1948.
If you ask people in Israel about the Nakba the majority don't know what it is
Eyal DanonAs Dr Ruth Firer, a historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, says, every country is guilty of telling its own version of history and of being the hero of its own story.
"But every narrative has to be flexible enough to let others live by it. If one's own history is written in a way that doesn't let others live by it then we have a problem".
And the problem isn't just on the Israeli side.
Garbled picture
At a girls high school in Ramallah in the West Bank a civics class concentrates on the birth of Palestinian nationalism.
Asked what they know about the history of the Jewish people on the other side of the security barrier, few show much interest or understanding.
Palestinian refugees claim rights to return to what is now Israel"Yes we know their history, that they used to cause problems in Britain," says one 16-year-old of why the Jews came to Israel.
"They wanted to get rid of their problems. So they sent them to us because we didn't have anyone to protect us. "
It's a rather garbled picture of the past and when the discussion turns to the subject of the Holocaust, the girls are dismissive. ...
Palestinians should give up on a two-state solution ... demand a unified Palestine, with one-man, one-vote democratic government and equal rights
May 12, 2007 One Man, One Vote by Charley Reese
Palestinians should give up the idea of a two-state solution. It is as plain as a hippopotamus at a tea party that the only kind of state the Israelis will give them, if at all, is a politically and economically unviable collection of tiny enclaves separated by Israeli territory.
Instead, Palestinians should demand a unified Palestine, with one-man, one-vote democratic government and equal rights for all.
Of course, the Israelis won't agree to that, either. They know that while initially Palestinian Arabs would be a minority, in a few years they would become a majority because of a larger birthrate and a decline in Jewish immigrants.
Zionist ideology demands that Israel have a Jewish majority and Jewish control, which is why, to this day, the Israelis persist in various ways to try to ethnically cleanse the land of the original majority, which was Arabs.
Great Britain had no right to take an Arab country and present it as a gift to European Jews. Israel is today an ethnic-based state with discriminatory laws that would not be tolerated by the world community in any other state.
For example, under Israel's Law of Return, any Jew anywhere in the world can come and be pronounced a citizen when he steps on the tarmac. Across the border in the wretched Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria are people and their descendants who lived in Palestine for generations until driven out by the Israelis. They are not allowed to return and, of course, would never be granted citizenship.
This oddity that is Israel is maintained because the U.S. and Europe deliberately shut their eyes to its basic flaws and obfuscate the issues with endless talk about an alleged peace process that, in fact, does not now and never has existed. They are supported in this willful blindness by powerful Jewish lobbies, most of them run ironically by people who wouldn't dream of immigrating to Israel, where taxes are high and military service is compulsory.
May 12, 2007 One Man, One Vote by Charley Reese
Palestinians should give up the idea of a two-state solution. It is as plain as a hippopotamus at a tea party that the only kind of state the Israelis will give them, if at all, is a politically and economically unviable collection of tiny enclaves separated by Israeli territory.
Instead, Palestinians should demand a unified Palestine, with one-man, one-vote democratic government and equal rights for all.
Of course, the Israelis won't agree to that, either. They know that while initially Palestinian Arabs would be a minority, in a few years they would become a majority because of a larger birthrate and a decline in Jewish immigrants.
Zionist ideology demands that Israel have a Jewish majority and Jewish control, which is why, to this day, the Israelis persist in various ways to try to ethnically cleanse the land of the original majority, which was Arabs.
Great Britain had no right to take an Arab country and present it as a gift to European Jews. Israel is today an ethnic-based state with discriminatory laws that would not be tolerated by the world community in any other state.
For example, under Israel's Law of Return, any Jew anywhere in the world can come and be pronounced a citizen when he steps on the tarmac. Across the border in the wretched Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria are people and their descendants who lived in Palestine for generations until driven out by the Israelis. They are not allowed to return and, of course, would never be granted citizenship.
This oddity that is Israel is maintained because the U.S. and Europe deliberately shut their eyes to its basic flaws and obfuscate the issues with endless talk about an alleged peace process that, in fact, does not now and never has existed. They are supported in this willful blindness by powerful Jewish lobbies, most of them run ironically by people who wouldn't dream of immigrating to Israel, where taxes are high and military service is compulsory.
Monday, May 14, 2007
"Time is not on anyone's side," ... the absence of peacemaking is increasing the popularity of extremists across the Muslim world
Jordan's King Warns Cheney on Mideast | By JAMAL HALABY | The Associated Press | Monday, May 14, 2007; 7:01 AM
AMMAN, Jordan -- Jordan's king warned visiting U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney Monday that time was running out to use an Arab peace plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a royal palace statement.
King Abdullah II, a moderate Arab leader and a key U.S. ally, also called for a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear standoff with the West, the statement said.
"Jordan stands in support of a peaceful resolution to the issue of Iran's nuclear capabilities that would spare the region further tensions," Abdullah told Cheney in a closed-door meeting at the king's beachside residence in the Red Sea resort of Aqaba.
Abdullah said the Arab peace initiative, which was first launched in 2002 and revived at an Arab summit earlier this year, "still represented an opportunity to advance peace and end the Arab-Israeli conflict."
"Time is not on anyone's side," Abdullah warned. He did not elaborate, but he has previously said that the absence of peacemaking is increasing the popularity of extremists across the Muslim world.
The Palestinians have embraced the Arab plan, which calls for full peace with all Arab nations if Israel withdraws from territories captured in the 1967 Middle East War and agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state. It also calls for a "just solution" to the issue of Palestinian refugees.
Israel and the United States have said the plan could be a basis for reviving the peace process. But Israel has expressed reservations over many of its provisions, including the call to solve the Palestinian refugee issue. ...
Jordan's King Warns Cheney on Mideast | By JAMAL HALABY | The Associated Press | Monday, May 14, 2007; 7:01 AM
AMMAN, Jordan -- Jordan's king warned visiting U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney Monday that time was running out to use an Arab peace plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a royal palace statement.
King Abdullah II, a moderate Arab leader and a key U.S. ally, also called for a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear standoff with the West, the statement said.
"Jordan stands in support of a peaceful resolution to the issue of Iran's nuclear capabilities that would spare the region further tensions," Abdullah told Cheney in a closed-door meeting at the king's beachside residence in the Red Sea resort of Aqaba.
Abdullah said the Arab peace initiative, which was first launched in 2002 and revived at an Arab summit earlier this year, "still represented an opportunity to advance peace and end the Arab-Israeli conflict."
"Time is not on anyone's side," Abdullah warned. He did not elaborate, but he has previously said that the absence of peacemaking is increasing the popularity of extremists across the Muslim world.
The Palestinians have embraced the Arab plan, which calls for full peace with all Arab nations if Israel withdraws from territories captured in the 1967 Middle East War and agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state. It also calls for a "just solution" to the issue of Palestinian refugees.
Israel and the United States have said the plan could be a basis for reviving the peace process. But Israel has expressed reservations over many of its provisions, including the call to solve the Palestinian refugee issue. ...
