Tuesday, 30 September 2008

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at a cabinet meeting on Sunday. In an interview published Monday, he called for new thinking. (Pool photo by Uriel Sinai)

Olmert says Israel should pull out of West Bank

Published: September 29, 2008

JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank and 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.

He also dismissed as "megalomania" any thought that Israel 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 - 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," Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot in an interview to mark the Jewish new year that runs from Monday night until Wednesday night. "The time has come to say these things."

He said traditional Israeli defense strategists had learned nothing from past experiences and seemed stuck in the considerations of the 1948 Independence War.

"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, Olmert has publicly castigated himself for his earlier rightist 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 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem with a bulldozer and earth mover.

"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 Olmert made clear that the eastern, predominantly Arab sector had to be yielded "with special solutions" for the holy sites.

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."

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, 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 heads the Yisrael Beiteinu party, said in a radio interview that Olmert was "endangering the existence of the state of Israel irresponsibly."

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

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

Posted by Britannia Radio at 18:58