JERUSALEM, 11 August 2007 — The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot quoted Defense Minister Ehud Barak yesterday as calling recent peace moves with the Palestinians “fantasies” and saying Israel would not withdraw from the West Bank for at least five more years. The comments were attributed to Barak in “private conversations.”
If accurate, they are surprising because Barak heads the dovish Labor Party and offered the Palestinians sweeping territorial concessions seven years ago, when he served as prime minister.
Ronen Moshe, a spokesman for Barak, called the report “baseless,” saying Yediot’s report made Barak’s views seem far more extreme than they were. “The defense minister remains committed to the diplomatic process, although his first commitment is to the security of Israel’s citizens,” Moshe said. The Yediot report quoted Barak as saying, “Israelis have healthy intuition. They can’t be fed more fantasies about an upcoming agreement with the Palestinians.”
Israel won’t be able to pull out of the West Bank before it develops a technological response to rockets fired by Palestinian militants and more advanced missiles from Iran — a process that will take between three and five years, Barak said, according to the report.
The Israeli Army will not leave the West Bank “at least in the next five years,” Barak is quoted as saying. During his brief tenure as prime minister, Barak offered unprecedented territorial concessions to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in US-brokered talks that broke down after Israeli-Palestinian violence resumed in 2000.
Barak, who was voted out of office over his discredited peace moves, hopes to become prime minister again. His comments as reported in Yediot, if accurate, might mark an attempt to woo voters by positioning himself further to the right as peacemaking efforts gain momentum. Peace moves have been driven by Israeli and international attempts to shore up moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas against Islamic Hamas militants who took over the Gaza Strip in June.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been holding regular meetings with Abbas and has ordered the release of Palestinian prisoners and the transfer of frozen Palestinian tax funds in an attempt to bolster him.
Barak is dismissive of Olmert’s recent efforts, according to Yediot, referring to them as “packaging,” and asserting that Abbas is incapable of taking control of the West Bank and providing security there. As a result, according to Yediot, Barak does not intend to comply with Palestinian requests to remove checkpoints in the West Bank, saying this would endanger Israeli civilians.
Meanwhile, a Palestinian man was shot dead in a gunfight with Israeli security guards from an ultra-nationalist Jewish association in the Old City of occupied east Jerusalem yesterday, police said. It was the latest violent incident involving Jews and Arabs in the tense Arab sector of the city, the fate of which is one of the thorniest issues at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Jerusalem police chief Aaron Franco said the Palestinian seized a pistol from one of the guards not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Christian quarter of the walled Old City. He said the Palestinian shot and wounded the guard from the ultra-Orthodox Ateret Cohanim group, whose colleague gave chase and eventually killed him.
YNetNews reported that before killing the shooter, the guard chased him through the streets of the Old City and that bystanders were wounded in the pursuit. Paramedic Shmule Petrobar told YNet: “We found the injured people in several streets, all sustained shooting wounds.”
In another development, Ismail Haniyeh, the sacked prime minister of the Hamas, said yesterday he did not want to establish a “police state” in the Gaza Strip. “We don’t want to militarize society, we don’t want a police state,” said Haniyeh, whose militants seized Gaza in June after over-running forces loyal to Abbas of the rival Fatah movement.
However, Haniyeh said in an address at a mosque in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis that there was a need for “strong authority in order to enforce the law.”
