DAR AL HARB-ISRAEL: FOREIGN MINISTER OF ISRAEL, LIVNI, OUTLINES 'PEACE PLAN'...

Israeli foreign minister outlines peace plan
(DPA)
29 December 2006

TEL AVIV - Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has her own peace plan, which calls for a negotiated, temporary Palestinian state the borders of which would be based on Israel’s controversial West Bank barrier, according to an interview published Friday.

‘I think I can conduct a dialogue with Abu Mazen (Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas),’ Livni told the Israeli Ha’aretz daily.

Talks on a a temporary state would ‘clarify where we want to go with the two-state vision,’ she said. New hopes for a political solution would then also increase chances that moderate leaders obtain a new mandate in the next Palestinian elections.

‘Maybe we can also formulate some of the basic principles of a permanent (peace) deal, even if we cannot reach such a permanent deal already now,’ she said.

Livni expressed strong opposition to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s shelved ‘convergence plan,’ under which Israel would withdraw from part of the West Bank and draw its final borders unilaterally - without a negotiated peace deal. Olmert has scrapped the plan following Israel’s month-long war with the Lebanese Hezbollah movement this summer.

‘The plan that I am talking about must give a solution for the problem of fire from the Palestinian areas,’ said the 48-year-old mother of two and member of Olmert’s centrist Kadima party.

‘That is one of the reasons why I prefer an agreed political process over a unilateral process,’ she said. Israel’s historic 2005 unilateral pullout from Gaza, after which Palestinian militants continued to launch rockets from the Strip, had ‘made it perfectly clear that you cannot just throw the keys and go.’

‘I am talking of an operative peace plan in a pretty high resolution,’ said Livni, who rose to prominence in Israeli politics in relatively little time as a protege of former premier Ariel Sharon, first as a member of his hard-line Likud party and then of his new Kadima faction founded in November last year.

Although it is unclear in what areas her plan deviates from Olmert’s current vision for a solution to the Middle East conflict, Livni stressed that she would not hesitate to run for prime minister against him if she did not get his backing.

Olmert, since the Lebanon war, has called for a revival of the stalled ‘road map’ peace plan peace process through direct talks with Abbas, whom he met on Saturday in the first Israeli-Palestinian summit in at least 18 months.

Livni also supports a revival of the roadmap but according to Haaretz wants to go straight to phase two of the plan, which provides for a provisional Palestinian state, and only then demand of Abbas that he implement stage one: the disarmament of Palestinian militants.

Livni also said she did not rule out negotiations with Syria and an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights, but said this was a ‘question of timing.’

‘Syria knows exactly what it needs to do to be part of the international community but it is doing the opposite,’ she said.

On Iran, Livni warned that if it achieved nuclear abilities this would quickly trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

‘Many states in the region understand that the combination of Iran’s ideology and the atom bomb is something that they will not be able to bear. Therefore, if Iran is ‘nuclearized’, they will do one of two things: compete with Iran or join it.’

She insisted that Israel had not changed its policy of ‘nuclear ambiguity,’ following speculation after Olmert inadvertently listed the Jewish state among nuclear nations during an interview in Germany earlier this month.

‘There is no change. I am a partner in this context and there is no decision on a policy change.


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