Palestinians should accept Israel’s conditions for participation in a Middle East peace conference, according to Italian Foreign Minister Gianni de Michelis, a longtime advocate of a Palestinian homeland.
In a front-page article published Wednesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica, he said that “this is an extraordinary occasion.”
“I do not deny that the conditions posed by Israel regarding the Palestinian delegation are difficult, but they are not such to exclude a possible compromise,” said the foreign minister, who has long been in favor of an international Middle East peace conference.
The Palestinians “can finally, concretely, place their cause at the center of international negotiations and before their inevitable interlocutors, the government and people of Israel,” de Michelis said.
“Even an unsatisfactory delegation composition would not preclude Palestinian respect for the substance of the talks.”
The conference will mandate that “everyone, and not just the Palestinians, must accept the premises that until yesterday they rejected.”
Any Palestinian “sabotage” of a conference, he said, would largely prove a statement made by veteran Israeli diplomat and pro-peace advocate Abba Eban that the Palestine Liberation Organization “has never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity,” he quoted.
“Never more than today have they had the possibility to prove him wrong,” he said.
He said that the current round of Middle East peace negotiations constitute a “historic occasion for the Palestinians, accepted for the” first time since 1948 as a political subject and fully involved in the events that above all regard their destiny.”
“One mustn’t create illusions,” he wrote. “The negotiations will be long, uncertain and difficult. But the simple fact of their getting underway would have, in political and psychological terms, an immense impact.”
De Michelis referred to a desire to apply “the Helsinki philosophy” created by the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe to “the Mediterranean and Middle East.”
The peace conference would create “a climate of reciprocal trust, on the basis of principles and rules that can facilitate the solution of conflicts existing in the region,” the foreign minister said.
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