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Arafat Calls For Sharon To Resume Talks As New PM Wants Calm First
GAZA CITY, March 8 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - On his first full day in office, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Thursday he would be willing to meet Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for negotiations, but only if the current violence ends, reports the Washington Post.
Arafat, who has been described by Sharon as "a terrorist" and "a liar," called on the new Israeli prime minister to resume talks based on signed accords, in an apparent easing of earlier demands that informal understandings also be considered.
But the hardline Sharon, whom Arafat has described as a "butcher" over the massacre of Palestinian refugees during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon that he orchestrated, insisted that calm must first be restored.
In his investiture speech on Wednesday, Sharon also called for peace but said there must first be an end to the conflict that has gripped the region for more than five months and cost more than 430 lives.
After a relaxed handover ceremony with the outgoing Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, the veteran right-winger said he would talk with Arafat "when the time is ripe" but insisted on calm in the Palestinian territories before doing so, the BBC reports.
"There is an ability if both sides are prepared to do this to turn aside from the tragic path of bloodshed. Our hand is extended in peace. We know that peace involves painful compromises for both sides," Sharon said.
According to the Post, Barak said that the Palestinian rejection of his peace offers, including the offer of a "state" in almost all the West Bank and Gaza Strip and parts of Jerusalem, "showed their true face. The Palestinian people are not ready for true peace."
Barak said his offers were off the table and "do not obligate" the Sharon government, the Post adds.
But analysts suggest that both Arafat and Sharon are in weak positions, with the Israeli prime minister trying to hold together a large coalition composed of members with widely divergent views, and Arafat heading a disintegrating authority that no longer has much more than symbolic powers over parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"On the surface in Israel, you find a coalition, but sooner or later the crisis will be exploding," said Mahdi Abdul Hadi of the Palestinian Academic Society for International Affairs.
"In Palestine there is no cover, the crisis is already there. There is already a division. Arafat is in a crisis, financially, politically, administratively and geographically," he added.
Arafat's Palestinian Authority has been crippled by Israel's five-month punitive closure of the West Bank and Gaza, which has stymied its already-poorly functioning bureaucracy and impoverished one million Palestinians.
The fighting, known to Muslims as the Intifada, or uprising, has also created local leaders who do not always wait for orders from Arafat.
Palestinians, for their part, rejected Sharon's condition for resuming talks and blamed Israel for clashes that have taken the lives of 423 people - including 347 Palestinians, 57 Israeli Jews and 19 others - in five months, MSNBC reports.
Palestinian lawmaker Ziad Abu-Zayyad, in response to Sharon, told MSNBC, "what can stop the violence is measures by the Israeli government ... to lift the siege and stop the violence of the Israeli army.''
Marwan Bargouthi, a Fatah leader in the West Bank, said: "We will stop the uprising tomorrow if Israel is ready to withdraw from Palestinian land.
"Sharon must understand that the only thing that he can do is to set a date for the funeral of the occupation because it is dead. The Israeli government can't do anything to revive it," he told reporters in Ramallah.
Arafat also sent a message to Sharon's investiture address on Wednesday.
"Arafat confirmed to Sharon in this letter the need to respect international resolutions, in particular U.N. resolutions 242, 338 and 194," a Palestinian official said.
That was a reference to resolutions that call on Israel to pull out of lands captured in the 1967 Middle East war, which include east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
"The supreme mission of the new government is bolstering Israel's security," Sharon told parliament, pledging a "relentless struggle against violence and terror," according to the Post.
Arafat advisor Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP that Sharon has "an opportunity" to resume the peace process, which has been in tatters since the violence broke out.
"This new Israeli government has a new opportunity for the peace process and what is necessary is to create the correct environment to resume Palestinian-Israeli negotiations," he said.
In a document outlining its broad policy guidelines, Sharon's government said it would "respect previous political agreements that were ratified by parliament subject to their being carried out by the other side.
It also said it would "approach permanent status agreements on the basis of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 with Syria and the Palestinians."
The two sides last held a round of talks in the Egyptian resort of Taba, but they ended in January without any agreement.
Signed agreements include the 1993 Oslo accords, which provided for Palestinian autonomy, and the 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh deal, which provided for partial Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territory and set out the framework for reaching a still-unconcluded final peace agreement.
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat was skeptical about Sharon's peace offers, complaining that Sharon offered nothing specific. Peacemaking ''needs steps, deeds on the ground, not merely lip service,'' he said according to MSNBC.
Sharon appealed to the Palestinians to make peace, but said that "despite concessions we have made ... we still haven't found a willingness for reconciliation and true peace on the other side," he added.
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