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Foreign
Minister Tzipi Livni presented Israel's demands yesterday. First and
foremost, she said, Israel objects to the document's section on the
Palestinian refugees, which was not part of the initial Saudi draft,
but was added at the 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut.
"A new
summit is in the offing, and they ought to know which parts [of the
plan] are acceptable to Israel and what seems to us like an absolute
red line," she explained in an interview with Channel 10 television.
Livni
said that the original draft presented by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
"was, in my view, positive." That draft called for a full Israeli
withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders in exchange for peace and
normalization with the entire Arab world.
"Admittedly, the
initiative spoke of the 1967 lines, but I only wish we were in a
situation in which the conflict was just a border dispute," she added.
The
new article inserted at the 2002 Beirut summit, however, demanded a
"just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, to be agreed upon in
accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194," and that
resolution calls for allowing the refugees to return to Israel. It
therefore contradicts Israel's vision of a two-state solution, which,
explained Livni, calls for a Jewish national homeland alongside a
Palestinian national homeland, with the latter serving as the solution
for the Palestinian refugees.
Livni said that she has
presented this stance in conversations with Palestinian representatives
with whom she met over the last month. She reiterated it in an
interview that was published in the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam
yesterday, in which she said bluntly, "It is impossible for Israel to
accept the Arab peace initiative in its current formulation."
Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert has said a few times over the last few months that
the Saudi initiative contains "positive elements."
The Riyadh
summit, which was called by King Abdullah, is slated to take place on
March 28 and 29. The agenda includes the Arab peace initiative, the
Iranian threat and the communal tensions in Lebanon. Over the last few
weeks, Abdullah has tried to mediate on all of these issues, with the
goal of promoting regional stability.
Olmert, meanwhile, will
hold another meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas
in two weeks, while Livni will travel to Europe next week to meet with
European foreign ministers in the framework of Israel's Association
Agreement with the European Union. During these meetings, she will urge
her European counterparts not to deviate from the Quartet's demand that
any Palestinian government recognize Israel, renounce terror and honor
previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements. She will also present what she
called "the Israeli peace initiative" for a two-state solution.
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