GERONA, Spain, 17 November 2006 — Spain, France and Italy unveiled a five-point Middle East peace initiative yesterday, calling Israeli-Palestinian violence intolerable and saying that Europe must take a lead role in ending the conflict.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced the plan at a summit with President Jacques Chirac of France. Italy is also on board, Zapatero said, and Spain hopes to win the endorsement of Britain and Germany and the broader European Union in the run-up to a December summit in Brussels.
“We cannot remain impassive in the face of the horror that continues to unfold before our eyes,” Zapatero told a news conference in this coastal city near the border with France. The initiative largely overlaps with a package the Palestinians have offered to Israel.
Zapatero, asked if the initiative did not first need the support of Israel and the United States, said it made sense for the three largest contributors to the expanded UN force in Lebanon to assert themselves for peace. “Someone has to take the first move,” he said.
The plan has five components: an immediate cease-fire, formation of a national unity government by the Palestinians that can gain international recognition, an exchange of prisoners — including the Israeli soldier whose kidnapping sparked the war in Lebanon and fighting in Gaza this summer — talks between Israel’s prime minister and the Palestinian president and an international mission in Gaza to monitor a cease-fire.
Zapatero made no explicit reference in his comments to a need for Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist before the peace process gets under way. The group’s steadfast refusal to recognize the Jewish state has been the main sticking point in efforts to resume aid to the cash-strapped Palestinian government.
Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, speaking in Rome, described the plan as “a series of actions aimed at achieving concrete results in a situation where suffering has reached intolerable levels.”
Chirac said he hoped the EU — with particular input from foreign policy chief Javier Solana — would seek to “begin the political reforms necessary for the Middle East.”
The Franco-Spanish summit came amid hopes in Europe for a greater voice in world affairs, particularly after midterm US elections in which voters punished President George W. Bush and gave control of Congress to the Democrats.
Many hope the results will usher in a more humble US foreign policy, in which Washington increasingly seeks the advice and input of its European allies.
Zapatero cited the Israeli shell blast that killed 19 people last week in a Palestinian village and the death this week of an Israeli woman in a Palestinian rocket attack.
The violence, he said, “has reached a level of deterioration that requires determined, urgent action by the international community.”
The Palestinians are desperate to end a crippling aid boycott that the West imposed after Hamas won Palestinian elections and refused to rescind its call for Israel’s destruction.
Eventually, a major international conference on Mideast peace should be held, Zapatero said. Spain hosted a landmark peace conference in 1991 that laid the groundwork for the Oslo accords, which in turn led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority.
Mideast peace, Zapatero said, “is one of the factors that can contribute most to cornering fanaticism and terrorism.”
A senior Israeli official rejected the initiative outright. “The common Spanish-French-Italian initiative does not exist. The announcement by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is hasty,” said the Foreign Ministry official who refused to be named.
“Mr. Zapatero’s statements are different from those of French President Jacques Chirac,” the official noted, saying Israel was “appalled by such naivety” from the Spanish premier.
“We will certainly see if he (Zapatero) manages to convince the Palestinians to stop rocket fire on Israel,” he said.
Referring to a prisoner swap, the official said the Egyptians had been working on such an initiative since June and asked why Zapatero did not come forward sooner.
On the concept of an international peace conference — which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected during a visit to the United States this week — the official dismissed the plan as “empty.”
“What does he want? An international cocktail party in a beautiful Madrid mansion? Does he have concrete ideas to make progress on the fundamental questions?” he asked.
The Palestinian Authority welcomed the initiative. “We salute the idea of organizing an international peace conference on the Middle East, especially as the roadmap makes provision for holding such a conference,” spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said.
The roadmap, the last international plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has made next to no progress since its launch in 2003, and has already missed its initial target date to create a Palestinian state.
“We welcome any international effort seeking to unblock the peace process and implement the roadmap,” added Abu Rudeina.
Europe’s efforts to help broker a peace deal have hit some obstacles recently, and the continent could face problems this time as well. Many in Israel view European leaders as pro-Palestinian and are wary of their motives.
Last month, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, a leading European voice on the Middle East, said that the roadmap plan for peace was fatally stalled and that Europe should take the initiative to come up with a new plan.
Israeli and Palestinian officials were quick to reject his comments as overly pessimistic. Both sides insisted that the roadmap was not dead, just in serious need of a mechanism for implementation.
The US backed roadmap, devised in 2003, called for the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel but it never got off the ground because neither side lived up to even their initial commitments under the blueprint.
