OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 20 December 2003 — The hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon drew fire from all sides including the United States yesterday over his threat to unilaterally separate from Palestinians if peace talks fail.
The plan would deny Palestinians land they want for a state and keep them behind a controversial barrier through the West Bank, but would also involve shifting Jewish settlers away from Palestinian population centers to shorten security lines.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei, a moderate, said on Thursday he was disappointed with Sharon’s “threat” and urged negotiations. A meeting between the two has been in the pipeline for weeks.
The White House also criticized Sharon’s go-it-alone plan and expressed concern unilateral steps would contravene the “road map” peace plan envisaging a contiguous Palestinian state by 2005.
The United States “would oppose any unilateral steps that block the road toward negotiations under the roadmap that leads to the two state vision,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
“A settlement must be negotiated and we would oppose any Israeli effort to impose a settlement,” he said.
An Israeli official said Sharon had kept the White House abreast of his thinking and may soon visit Washington to present the plan to President George W. Bush. No date had been set.
Sharon said Israel would take steps such as transferring towns to Palestinian security control and opening roadblocks that hamper Palestinian movement to further the road map peace plan in the coming weeks.
But he warned Palestinians that they must “uproot terrorist groups” within months if they did not want Israel to impose a plan to retain control over many Jewish settlements and leave Palestinians with less than they would obtain through talks.
Sharon set no timetable for acting on his unilateral separation plan. The ambiguity left the Israeli political landscape unchanged and many Israelis skeptical anything would come of the speech.
Israeli opposition leader Shimon Peres blasted Sharon’s plan to halt contacts with Palestinians, saying it would make the road map impossible.
At the other end of the political spectrum, settlers said they would refuse to evacuate. “Uprooting us or kicking us out of here won’t bring peace... We will remain here to the end. Period,” said 29 year-old Itai Harel at the Migron settlement, a windswept hilltop cluster of trailer-homes in the West Bank.
Sharon said that whatever the case, work would be speeded on the huge barrier that Israel is building through the West Bank and says it needs to keep out suicide bombers. Palestinians call the obstacle of wire and concrete an attempt to annex land.
Islamic factions sworn to Israel’s destruction and at the forefront of a bombing campaign said they could see no suggestion that Sharon’s plan would bring peace.
“Our resistance will continue until we regain our full rights and full land,” said senior Hamas leader Abdelaziz Al-Rantissi.
Meanwhile, thousands of Hamas sympathizers braved the torrential rain to gather in Gaza City for the group’s 16th birthday. Hamas was founded in December 1987 in Gaza, which remains its stronghold.
In the West Bank, Israeli troops arrested two local leaders of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Arafat’s Fatah movement, a Fatah official said.
Hashem Abu Hamdan and Muhammad Oweiss were seized in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus, along with six other Palestinians. An army spokesman was unable to confirm the arrests. Israeli soldiers operating in the West Bank city of Nablus yesterday carried out house-to-house searches for militants, witnesses said.
