In an interview with Fox News today Israel\u2019s Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, also Minister of Intelligence, hinted if a full peace agreement can\u2019t be reached in current American mediated talks with the Palestinian\u2019s, a series of partial agreements could be negotiated.<\/p>\n
The suggestion of partial agreements was floated by Meridor when I asked him \u201cyou said if the current talk\u2019s don\u2019t go anywhere it will be \u2018hard for Israel\u2019. What is on the hard menu, what do you worry about at the end of the four months\u201d?<\/p>\n
(The current so called Proximity talks, where Palestinians and Israeli\u2019s don\u2019t sit together but negotiate through American envoy George Mitchell we\u2019re designed to unfold over a period of four months.)<\/p>\n
Meridor replied \u201cfirst of all it\u2019s not four months, I don\u2019t know the time limit. I think we need to get an agreement. If we can\u2019t 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\u2019t resolve final issues like the delineation of the border, the situation of Jerusalem, or refugees\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But Meridor stated in my interview with him in Jerusalem, \u201cWhy I think it is important we move ahead? I\u2019ll tell you. We have a relatively quiet situation regarding terror, I don\u2019t want it to collapse, as we have seen other times\u201d. \u00a0\u00a0And he added the Palestinian economy is doing much better and people in the West Bank see more jobs and see hope. \u00a0He warned \u201cI don\u2019t want this to go down the drain with some outburst of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many observers say the clock is talking on peace talks, and that if they fail there could be another intifada or Palestinian uprising. \u00a0\u00a0Over the weekend a member of the PLO Executive was quoted in a Jordanian Newspaper as saying Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, \u00a0does not rule out the possibility of resuming an \u201carmed struggle\u201d against Israel if U.S. sponsored talks fail.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Recently Israel\u2019s President Shimon Peres alleged the Syrians had passed scud missiles to the Hezbollah. \u00a0When I pressed Meridor today on the question if Israel has hard evidence of scud transfers he said \u201cI don\u2019t want to speak in specific about it, but when people speak of it, they know what they base their talk on\u201d adding \u201cI think that people understand the danger in this development, I can not say any more \u00a0details about this\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In an interview with Fox News today Israel\u2019s Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, also Minister of Intelligence, hinted if a full peace agreement can\u2019t be reached in current American mediated talks with the Palestinian\u2019s, a series of partial agreements could be negotiated. The suggestion of partial agreements was floated by Meridor when I asked him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4643,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-576535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4643"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}