In an interview with Fox News today Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, also Minister of Intelligence, hinted if a full peace agreement can’t be reached in current American mediated talks with the Palestinian’s, a series of partial agreements could be negotiated.
The suggestion of partial agreements was floated by Meridor when I asked him “you said if the current talk’s don’t go anywhere it will be ‘hard for Israel’. What is on the hard menu, what do you worry about at the end of the four months”?
(The current so called Proximity talks, where Palestinians and Israeli’s don’t sit together but negotiate through American envoy George Mitchell we’re designed to unfold over a period of four months.)
Meridor replied “first of all it’s not four months, I don’t know the time limit. I think we need to get an agreement. If we can’t get a final agreement immediately we should at least proceed towards the agreement and have partial steps, one after the other building more and more of that Palestinian State, even if we can’t resolve final issues like the delineation of the border, the situation of Jerusalem, or refugees”.
Partial agreements are something unlikely to be accepted by the Palestinians who want an encompassing peace agreement that will lead them to a Palestinian State within two years from now.
But Meridor stated in my interview with him in Jerusalem, “Why I think it is important we move ahead? I’ll tell you. We have a relatively quiet situation regarding terror, I don’t want it to collapse, as we have seen other times”. And he added the Palestinian economy is doing much better and people in the West Bank see more jobs and see hope. He warned “I don’t want this to go down the drain with some outburst of violence.”
Many observers say the clock is talking on peace talks, and that if they fail there could be another intifada or Palestinian uprising. Over the weekend a member of the PLO Executive was quoted in a Jordanian Newspaper as saying Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, does not rule out the possibility of resuming an “armed struggle” against Israel if U.S. sponsored talks fail.
Meridor also discussed the growing threat to Israel from the Hezbollah, the Iranian sponsored organisation in Lebanon, now said to have some 14000 rockets in its war chest.
Recently Israel’s President Shimon Peres alleged the Syrians had passed scud missiles to the Hezbollah. When I pressed Meridor today on the question if Israel has hard evidence of scud transfers he said “I don’t want to speak in specific about it, but when people speak of it, they know what they base their talk on” adding “I think that people understand the danger in this development, I can not say any more details about this”.