HE the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor al-Thani and US Secretary of State John Kerry speak to the media in Washington on Monday. With them are (from left) Saudi ambassador to the US Adel al-Jubeir, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifah, Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Arabi, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki and Egyptian Foreign Minister Kamel Amr.
AFP/Washington
The Arab League flagged a shift in the terms of its 2002 peace initiative to incorporate mutual land swaps under an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, a step welcomed by Israel and Washington yesterday.
The principle of land swaps has been affirmed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders in previous rounds of talks but has never formed part of the Arab initiative unveiled by Saudi Arabia in February 2002.
Under the original plan, the League’s 22 member states would forge full diplomatic relations with Israel in exchange for “total withdrawal by Israel to the June 4, 1967 lines” and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
But the Arab League said on Monday it could involve a “comparable and mutual agreed minor swap of the land” to reflect the realities on the ground.
Details of the revamped proposal emerged following talks in Washington between top Arab League members and US Secretary of State John Kerry.
However, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat played down the significance.
“This is not something new. The Arab delegation presented the official Palestinian position: Upon Israel’s unequivocal acceptance of the two-state solution on the 1967 border, the State of Palestine as a sovereign country might consider minor agreed border modifications equal in size and quality, in the same geographic area, and that do not harm Palestinian interests,” Erakat said.
His Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, hailed the Arab League announcement as “very good news”, although another official was much cooler.
“Israel welcomes the encouragement that the Arab League delegation and the secretary of state have given to the diplomatic process,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“The two sides can present their positions when the negotiations start.”
Livni described the move as “an important step”, saying she hoped it would lead to a renewal of direct peace talks that collapsed just weeks after they were relaunched in September 2010.
“The statement that was made by the Arab League today is a very positive statement,” she told AFP.
“I believe it is very important for the Palestinians to understand that the Arab world supports a negotiated peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians that ends the conflict,” she said, stressing the details would have to be hammered out by the two sides, “and hopefully soon”.
“I hope that the Arab League’s statement and position can help in relaunching negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The sooner, the better.”
Echoing Livni, Kerry said yesterday it was “a very big step forward”.
Details of the new stance were briefly mentioned by the Arab League delegation’s leader, HE the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor al-Thani, at a news conference with Kerry.
“The Arab League delegation understands that peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis is starting (and) is a strategic choice for the Arab states,” he said.
“The Arab League delegation affirmed that agreement should be based on the two-state solution on the basis of the 4th of June 1967 lines, with the possible of comparable and mutual agreed minor swap of the land.”
Such a position marks a departure from the original text of the proposal, and comes closer to the US position as laid out by President Barack Obama in May 2011 that any agreement must be “based on the 1967 lines with mutually-agreed land swaps”.
Since taking office on February 1, Kerry has plunged into the maelstrom of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the hope of breaking the impasse and seeing a resumption of some form of talks.
He has suggested the Arab Peace Initiative could provide a framework for a future deal.
For Israel, the principle of swapping land is a way to hold on to densely populated Jewish settlement blocs built on occupied Palestinian land.
Although the Palestinians accept the idea of “minor and mutually agreed land swaps” they have rejected outright any idea of letting Israel hold on to large swathes of settlements.
Until now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has categorically rejected outright any return to what he has said would be the “indefensible” lines before June 4, 1967.
Targeted air strike kills militant in Gaza Strip
ReutersGaza/Jerusalem
Israel yesterday launched its first targeted attack on a militant in Gaza since a war in November, killing a Palestinian jihadist in an air strike that put further strain on a five-month-old ceasefire.
There was also bloodshed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where for the first time since 2011, a Palestinian killed a Jewish settler. Israeli soldiers shot and wounded the attacker after he stabbed the man at a busy intersection.
Both incidents held the potential of wider confrontation - along the Gaza frontier, where militant factions have been carrying out intermittent rocket attacks, and in the West Bank, where clashes between stone-throwing Palestinians and the Israeli military intensified in recent months.
Israel said the Palestinian killed in the air strike, Haitham al-Mishal, 29, was a jihadi who was an expert in making rockets. It accused him of involvement in a rocket attack from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula against Israel’s Red Sea resort of Eilat on April 17, which had caused no injuries or damage.
“I had said we would not sit by quietly and let this pass ... we will not accept a drizzle of fire from Gaza or from Sinai,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after the strike.
Islamist militants in Gaza have fired sporadically at Israel in the past weeks despite an Egyptian-brokered truce that ended an eight-day conflict in November in which rockets hit Israeli cities and Israeli warplanes struck Palestinian territory.
Hamas has cracked down on Salafi rivals it sees as jeopardising its control of the Gaza Strip.
Egypt, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, has also battled militants in Sinai, where lawlessness has mounted since president Hosni Mubarak’s downfall in 2011.
In Gaza, Mishal’s body was wrapped in a black flag of the Salafi factions after the air strike, near a Hamas training camp. “The Sword of Islam” Salafi group threatened to avenge his death, saying “the response will come very soon”.
An Islamist website described Mishal as a leader of Magles Shoura Al-Mujahideen, which claimed responsibility for the Eilat hit.
Hamas appeared to take a softer tone. A spokesman for the movement, Fawzi Barhoum, said the Israeli attack was “unjustified and a dangerous escalation”, but he urged Egypt to press Israel “to abide by calm and stop the aggression”.
In the nearby West Bank, the killing of Eviatar Borovsky, 31, stoked anger among settlers, who complained the military had failed to respond strongly to mounting stone-throwing incidents.
Borovsky’s attacker, who a military spokesman said grabbed his weapon after stabbing him, was identified as Salam Assad Az-Zaghal of the mainstream Fatah movement. Palestinian officials said he was released two months ago from an Israeli prison after serving a 3-1/2-year term.
Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official in the West Bank city of Nablus, said settlers launched “large-scale attacks” in four villages in the territory after the incident.
“They are throwing stones and attempted to set a house on fire. They also hurled rocks at a school bus and smashed its windows. The situation is going from bad to worse. A mosque was also attacked,” Daghlas said.
