Israel must give up almost all West Bank: Olmert

ISRAEL: Israel’s interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel must give up virtually all the occupied West Bank including east Jerusalem, insisting in an interview published on Monday this was key to achieving peace with the Palestinians.

“We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories,” said Olmert, who heads an interim government following his September 21 resignation.

“We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace,” he told the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot newspaper.

“Including in Jerusalem,” he said in reference to the predominently Arab eastern part of the Holy City which Israel occupied and annexed after the 1967 war and which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.

His comments are expected to stir deep controversy. Israel officially considers Jerusalem its “eternal, undivided” capital, a view Olmert — a former mayor of the city — said he shared for many years.

He said that also applied to indirect negotiations with longtime foe Syria which were relaunched in May after a eight-year hiatus, with Turkey acting as a go-between.

He made it clear peace would come at a price for both sides, with Israel having to give up the annexed Golan Heights and demanding Syria end its current ties with Iran and stop backing “the Hamas terrorism, the Al-Qaeda terrorism and the jihad in Iraq.”

“In both cases, the decision we have to make is a decision that we have been refusing for 40 years to consider with our eyes open,” he said, warning, however that there were no risk-free solutions.

He did not rule out military confrontation in Syria in the coming years or renewed bloodshed in the West Bank.

“We don’t know, for example, what will happen in the Palestinian Authority after January 9, 2009,” he said.

On the one hand, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose term ends that day, could remain in power “with some manipulation,” he said.

“But we believe that there is a very great danger that there will be a bloody clash, which will thwart any possibility of continuing negotiations and perhaps will force us to be involved in the confrontation, with bloodshed, with everything that could happen as a result.”

Olmert formally presented his resignation on September 21 amid deep political turmoil over a series graft allegations that caused police to recommend criminal indictments.

He will remain interim prime minister until a new government is formed. The governing Kadima party’s newly elected leader, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is scrambling to put together a government coalition in order to avert snap elections that could put the right-wing Likud party in power.

Jerusalem, Monday, AFP