RAMALLAH, 29 October 2007 — Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman, who is also chairman of the right-wing Israeli Beiteinu party, yesterday set his red lines in an official document presented to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ahead of a US-sponsored Mideast peace conference scheduled to take place in Annapolis at the end of the year.

The hawkish minister said his party would only support a final-status agreement if it included the transfer of Arab-Palestinians living inside Israel to Palestinian territories. Lieberman also stipulated the deployment of NATO forces in Palestinian areas to ensure Israel’s safety in case of a surge of violence.

The document came on the heels of declarations by Lieberman that he would leave the government and actively seek its downfall if Olmert pushed for substantial Israeli concessions. “We won’t remain partners in the government if there are significant negotiations on core subjects,” Lieberman told Israeli Army Radio yesterday.

In his document, Lieberman reiterates his party’s policy that calls for land swaps — including in some east Jerusalem neighborhoods — discounts, outright, the possibility of a “safe passage” between the West Bank and Gaza. “The state of Israel will not allow passage between Gaza and Judea and Samaria (West Bank) that transverses its sovereign territory,” the document reads. “This situation is congruent with the one that existed prior to Jun. 4, 1967.”

Lieberman also expressed his opposition to any concessions in the matter of Palestinian refugees’ “right of return.” Even on the “humanitarian level,” Lieberman says, “this issue is absolute and non-negotiable.” On the international level, the document demands that any final-status agreement include international guarantees of Israel’s security and an across-the-board revocation of UN resolutions 242 and 338, which call for a full Israeli pullback to 1967 borders.

Despite his willingness to allow for some compromise in east Jerusalem, Lieberman insists that the holy sites remain exclusively under Israeli sovereignty, and that people of all religions be given the right to worship in and around the city’s holy sites.

In response, Arab Member of Israeli Knesset (Parliament) M.K. Ahmed Tibi of the United Arab List party said, “There can be no peace agreement without the dismantlement of settlements and the removal of settlers, including immigrants, who have come from abroad and have taken control in the West Bank of land that doesn’t belong to them...The borders must be along 1967 lines, including east Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.”

M.K. Jamal Zahalkeh of the Balad party said that Arab-Palestinians are opposed to the “Jerusalem for Umm el-Fahm (an Arab city inside Israel),” deal. “Lieberman should calm down. There won’t be a deal if there is no essential change in Israel’s stance towards the Arab peace initiative,” said Zahalkeh.

M.K. Mohammad Barakeh, chairman of the Hadash party, said that Lieberman’s declarations would “torpedo peace talks even before they have begun.”

Barakeh meanwhile called the Israel Beiteinu head a “troublemaker” who sat in the government and preached “coarse violence.”