Olmert to deal with
'irrelevant' Abbas
Under global pressure, 'convergence' becomes bilateral--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Ryan Jones
June 13, 2006
Under pressure from the international community to surrender Israel's biblical heartland in coordination with the Palestinian Arabs, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is set to transform his "convergence" plan from a unilateral affair into a bilateral deal with PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas.That despite the fact Olmert and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, have branded Abbas irrelevant to the peace process by virtue of Hamas' control of nearly every facet of "Palestinian" government.
The terms of any final status agreement concluded with Abbas, Livni has argued in the media, would have to be implemented by the ministries controlled by Hamas, which has vowed to maintain its rejection of Israel's sovereignty and to continue seeking the Jewish state's ultimate demise.
But the perceived necessity to appease Israel's Western "allies," it would seem, has trumped Olmert's and Livni's recognition of this uncomfortable fact.
According to Ha'aretz, which cited senior government officials, the Prime Minister's Office and the Foreign Ministry are in the midst of drafting a proposal for the establishment of an interim "Palestinian" state in all of Gaza and 90 percent of Judea and Samaria.
That state's provisional borders will roughly follow the path of Israel's yet-to-be-completed security fence, with the understanding that the fence's route does not represent the borders of a final status agreement.
Israel hopes to present the proposal as an implementation of Phase II of the US-backed Road Map peace plan, thereby satisfying American and European demands that it resume negotiations with that part of the Palestinian Authority still loyal to Abbas.
Ha'aretz noted that this is being done despite the fact that the "Palestinians" have yet to even begin implementing their Phase I obligation - the dismantling of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
European Union envoy Mark Otte told the leftist newspaper that Israel should sweeten the deal by handing over control of the Jordan River Valley to European monitors, as it did with the Gaza-Egypt border. That concession, which Israel was strong-armed into accepting by Washington, permitted the smuggling of vast quantities of terrorist weapons into Gaza.
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jnewswire.com