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Olmert: Israel should quit most occupied land
By Ilana Curiel/Ethan Bronner
Y-net/New York Times/Reuters
September 29, 2008
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3603841,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/world/middleeast/30olmert.html?hp
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3598220,00.html

`We should withdraw from almost all of the territories, including in east Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights,` PM tells Yedioth Ahronoth in special Rosh Hashana interview. Palestinian FM: We wish we had heard this personal opinion before he resigned

Israel should withdraw from nearly all territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war in return for peace with the Palestinians and Syria, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was quoted on Monday as telling a newspaper.

Olmert, in a caretaker role since quitting on September 21, said he was breaking new ground in calling for a broad pullback from the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians hope to establish a state, and in the annexed Golan Heights, which Syria wants back.

`(I am saying) what no previous Israeli leader has ever said: we should withdraw from almost all of the territories, including in east Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights,` Olmert, who resigned over corruption allegations, told Yedioth Ahronoth.

The Israeli daily called it a `legacy interview,` published on the eve of the Jewish new year, in which Olmert went further in making offers for peace than he ever did publicly when he was in active office, with greater power to see them carried out.

`We wish we had heard this personal opinion ... (before) he resigned,` said Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki. `It is a very important commitment but it came so late. We wish this commitment can be fulfilled by the (next) Israeli government.`


`Few signs of progress`

According to Western and Palestinian officials, Olmert has proposed in peace talks with the Palestinians an Israeli withdrawal from some 93 percent of the occupied West Bank, plus all of the Gaza Strip, from which Israel pulled out in 2005.

Olmert has said repeatedly that Israel intends to keep major Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank in any future peace deal with the Palestinians.

A peace agreement, Olmert has said, would mean Israel would have to compensate the Palestinians for the land it hopes to retain by `close to a 1-to-1 ratio.`

In exchange for the settlement enclaves, Olmert has proposed about a 5 percent land swap giving the Palestinians a desert territory adjacent to the Gaza Strip, as well as land on which to build a transit corridor between Gaza and the West Bank.

The negotiations, which Olmert has vowed to continue until he leaves office when a new government is formed, have shown few signs of progress and both sides acknowledge chances are slim of meeting Washington`s target of a deal by the end of the year.

Palestinian chief negotiator Ahmed Qurei, speaking before Olmert`s interview, said annexation of settlements would prevent the Palestinians from creating a viable and contiguous country.

`We can`t have a state with settlements dividing the land,` Qurei said.

Another senior Palestinian negotiator said tracts Olmert proposed to exchange in a peace deal `are lands we don`t want.`

Olmert has also engaged Syria in indirect negotiations with Turkish mediation. In the interview, he said peace would be impossible `without eventually giving up the Golan Heights.`

He has so far put off talks on sharing Jerusalem and ruled out a so-called `right of return` for Palestinian refugees, a central Palestinian demand. On both issues, there is strong opposition in Israel to significant concessions.

Olmert, who could face criminal indictment in a corruption investigation, will remain prime minister until a new government is approved by parliament. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is trying to form a coalition.

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JERUSALEM : Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.

In an interview published Monday, he called for new thinking. He also dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel would or should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.

In an unusually frank and soul-searching interview granted after he resigned to fight corruption charges — he remains interim prime minister until a new government is sworn in — Mr. Olmert discarded longstanding Israeli defense doctrine and called for radical new thinking, in words that are sure to stir controversy as his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, tries to build a coalition.

“What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” Mr. Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot in the interview on the occasion of the Jewish new year, observed from Monday evening till Wednesday evening. “The time has come to say these things.”

He said that traditional Israeli defense strategists had learned nothing from past experiences and that they seemed stuck in the considerations of the 1948 war of independence.

“With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop,” he said. “All these things are worthless.”

He added, “Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel’s basic security?”

Over the last year, Mr. Olmert has publicly castigated himself for his earlier right-wing views and he did so again in this interview. On Jerusalem, for example, he said: “I am the first who wanted to enforce Israeli sovereignty on the entire city. I admit it. I am not trying to justify retroactively what I did for 35 years. For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at reality in all its depth.”

He said that maintaining sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem, Israel’s official policy, would involve bringing 270,000 Palestinians inside Israel’s security barrier. It would mean a continuing risk of terrorist attacks against civilians like those carried out this year by Jerusalem Palestinian residents with front-end loaders.

“A decision has to be made,” he said. “This decision is difficult, terrible, a decision that contradicts our natural instincts, our innermost desires, our collective memories, the prayers of the Jewish people for 2,000 years.”

The government’s public stand on Jerusalem until now has been to assert that the status of the city was not under discussion. But Mr. Olmert made clear that the eastern, predominantly Arab, sector had to be yielded “with special solutions” for the holy sites.

On peace with the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert said in the interview: “We face the need to decide but are not willing to tell ourselves, yes, this is what we have to do. We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories. We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace.”

Elsewhere in the interview, when discussing a land swap with the Palestinians, he said the exchange would have to be “more or less one to one.”

Mr. Olmert also addressed the question of Syria, saying that Israel had to be prepared to give up the Golan Heights but that in turn Damascus knew it had to change the nature of its relationship with Iran and its support for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia.

On Iran, Mr. Olmert said Israel would act within the international system, adding: “Part of our megalomania and our loss of proportions is the things that are said here about Iran. We are a country that has lost a sense of proportion about itself.”

Reaction from the Israeli right was swift. Avigdor Lieberman, who leads the Yisrael Beiteinu party, said on the radio that Mr. Olmert was “endangering the existence of the State of Israel irresponsibly.”

He added that those who thought Israel’s problem was a lack of defined borders — as Mr. Olmert stated in the interview — “are ignoramuses who don’t understand anything, and they invite war.”

As they reacted to Mr. Olmert’s remarks, Palestinian negotiators said it was satisfying to hear Mr. Olmert’s words but they said the words did not match what he had offered them so far. Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior Palestinian official, told Palestinian Radio that it would have been better if Mr. Olmert had taken this position while in office rather than while leaving it and that Mr. Olmert had not yet presented a detailed plan for a border between Israel and a Palestinian state.

In theory, Mr. Olmert will continue peace negotiations while awaiting the new government. But analysts generally say that having been forced to resign his post, he will not be able to close a deal.

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Ilana Curiel`s commentary

PM again renounces Greater Israel vision, says government should invest in other areas

As he prepares to bid the post of Kadima chairman farewell, Ehud Olmert again renounced the Greater Israel vision, saying Israel`s future does not lie in Judea and Samaria.

Retrospectively, the State of Israel invested great resources in the West Bank in vain, the PM said during a tour at a student village Wednesday.

`We invested our mental resources and thoughts in `how to build Judea and Samaria,` yet history made clear to us that the State of Israel has other realistic and viable options,` Olmert said. `The State of Israel`s future won`t be found in intermixing with the Palestinians, but rather, is to be found in unpopulated regions that are desperate for our entrepreneurship and innovation.`

`The State of Israel invested great energies in order to build where in retrospect it turned out the country won`t be built,` the PM added. `I`m saying this carefully…I have great appreciation for the people who built their homes in those places, and in the past I too supported them.`

During the tour, a student asked Olmert whether he will move to the Negev once he ends his political career, similarly to former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

The PM replied: `It is difficult for me to answer this question because I still don`t know what I`ll be doing. My decision to resign was painful…I know there are many other things I could have done that would have made this nation happy. Yet I have hold bitterness, anger, or fury towards anyone.`

A.K.
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