The Jerusalem Post reports:
The teams of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas met in Jerusalem Tuesday, ahead of a private meeting between the two leaders.
Israel Radio reported that during the extended meeting the Israelis gave their Palestinian counterparts general offers on core issues. An unnamed official was quoted as saying that the points on which the sides reach some degree of accord would then be taken up for detailed negotiations in higher levels…
Among the proposals made by the Israeli team is an offer to share control of the Temple Mount between the three major religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) and to cede control of the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem to the PA. The policing of major West Bank towns Ramallah, Jenin and Nablus would also be given to the Palestinians.
An unconfirmed Al Jazeera report said that the Israeli proposal made no mention of the Palestinian “right of return,” but that it called to create a demilitarized Palestinian state along the borderlines of June 4th 1967.
Not bad for the Palestinians one would think, but sadly Hamas disagrees:
Fathi Hamad, a Hamas senior in Gaza, said only moments after Abbas and Olmert began their meeting in Olmert’s official residence in Rehavia that Abbas was “behaving as if he is working for Olmert, and by this, bringing his own end nearer.”
Although the issue is far from resolved (personally I wonder whether it will ever be resolved) it seems to me that this should be generally seen as a step in the right direction. The difficult, though, is that whenever Israel has given in to Palestinian demands, Palestinian extremists have interpreted it as a sign of weakness and have used their (new) lands to attack Israel from. I am an Israel supporter, but also someone who believes that if the issue is ever going to be resolved, it will take a two-state solution. Israel will have to give in, and will have to give up some lands it conquered if it wants peace, but it seems to me that land for peace is not such a bad deal. The question is: how likely is it that giving up lands will result in peace?
The Palestinians have to change their propaganda. As long as the PA keeps feeding its people hatred and anti-semitism, the peace process will go nowhere. This should be part of the deal as well: there are websites like Palestinian Media Watch out there who can inform us about what PA TV broadcasts. More often than not, its programs are filled with hatred towards Israel and even all Jews.
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