OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 7 October — EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana arrived yesterday in the Middle East for talks to help ease the two-year crisis as violence in the West Bank left two Palestinians dead, one of them a gunman killed in clashes. In a meeting with Solana, a regular visitor to the region, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer asked for European officials to boycott Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, isolated in his ruined Ramallah headquarters after yet another Israeli siege last month.
“European officials’ contacts with Arafat and their messages of sympathy toward him are a waste of time,” said the Labour Party hawk in talks here with Solana, who is to meet the Palestinian leader in Ramallah today. “This European policy does not help encourage moderate elements in the Palestinian Authority, inasmuch as Arafat wants the status quo to continue,” he said.
However, after talks with Arafat’s security adviser Muhammad Dahlan in Gaza City later, Solana said he would meet the Palestinian leader, stressing the defense minister’s comments had only been made to the press and not directly to him. Israel and the United States want to see Arafat dropped, or at least sidelined to a purely ceremonial position.
Solana is also due to meet the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon today. The Spanish diplomat said at a meeting of EU defense ministers on the Greek island of Crete on Saturday that the Palestinians were drifting rudderless without an effective government. “Now there is no government, because all the crises have prevented compliance with resolutions of the legislative assembly,” he said. “The sooner they have a functional government which is a real government in the sense that everybody has responsibilities, that these responsibilities are clear, the better,” he said.
Meanwhile, two more Palestinian were killed in the West Bank, one a 24-year-old farmer shot dead by rampaging Jewish settlers near the northern city of Nablus while he was trying to harvest olives in his fields, witnesses and medics said. And in Jenin, a gunman from the Islamic Jihad group was shot dead in clashes with Israeli troops in the reoccupied northern town’s refugee camp, medics said.
US Middle East envoy William Burns was due to visit within days amid fresh tension with Palestinians over a new US law requiring the government to stipulate on documents that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. After President George W. Bush signed the legislation passed by the US Congress last week, the White House stressed the measure did not change its policy that Israelis and Palestinians must negotiate a solution to the status of Jerusalem as part of any final peace agreement.
In a countermove, Arafat, who called the US law a “catastrophe,” signed a law on Saturday declaring Jerusalem to be the capital of a future independent Palestinian state, Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) speaker Ahmed Qorei said. The PLC yesterday discussed the US law, which Palestinians and Arabs denounced as backing Israel’s claims to the city.
“This step shows that the US administration is turning its back on the peace process that it sponsors and on the bilateral agreements between Israel and the Palestinians,” Qorei said. It was not clear what effect Arafat’s law would have. Israel captured Arab East Jerusalem in the 1967 war and annexed it in a move not recognized internationally. It regards the entire city as its indivisible capital.
