Israeli officials have rejected a Palestine Liberation Organization call to begin negotiations on a permanent settlement for Palestinian self-rule.
Israel is not willing to begin negotiations on the final stage of Palestinian autonomy, Foreign Ministry Director-General Uri Savir told diplomatic reporters Thursday. ..TX-PLO Yasser Arafat said Wednesday that Palestinian officials “are willing to immediately begin the negotiations.”
Under the terms of the Declaration of Principles signed in September 1993, final-status negotiations are not slated to begin until May 1996.
Arafat made the comment after meeting Wednesday in the Gaza Strip with Israeli Police Minister Moshe Shahal.
Israel’s position is to negotiate according to the Oslo agreements, Savir said.
“I think chairman Arafat knows our position,” said Savir. “We will continue to learn lessons from Gaza and Jericho, and gradually implement stage two of the DOP. I doubt if there are any shortcuts.”
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are now focused on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank before the Palestinian elections.
Those negotiations have been at an impasse for months because of Israeli security concerns by a wave of terror attacks by opponents of the peace process.
Rejecting charges that the peace process is dead because of the prolonged impasse, Savir said he expects the Israeli army withdrawal and Palestinian elections to be implemented before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, a committee appointed to examine a proposal for a physical separation of the Israeli and Palestinian populations heard a negative assessment of the idea from military sources.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has been calling for the separation as a means of enhancing security in the face of terrorist attacks.
Rabin recently appointed Shahal to head a committee to look into the security aspects of the proposed separation.
Brig. Gen. Ya’acov Ami-Dror, head of the army intelligence research branch, told the committee this week that a separation line would have a marginal impact in the short term and a negative one in the long term.
He said in the event of a terrorist attack, crossing the separation line would give the attackers a sense of victory “one hundred times more than today,” the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported.
Ami-Dror also said that as soon as a separation line is drawn, “all those east of it — meaning the Jewish settlers — will be turned into hostages.”
Ha’aretz reported that Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the Israel Defense Force chief of staff, is expected to appear before the committee to try to mesh the plan for separation with a separate plan for an IDF withdrawal from West Bank population centers.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
