By Ted Belman
Olmert was recently interviewed and JPOST wrote about it in Israel must internalize divided J’lem’
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If Israel “will have to deal with a reality of one state for two peoples,” he said, this “could bring about the end of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. That is a danger one cannot deny; it exists, and is even realistic.”
“What will be if we don’t want to separate?” he asked rhetorically. “Will we live eternally in a confused reality where 50 percent of the population or more are residents but not equal citizens who have the right to vote like us? My job as prime minister, more than anything else, is to ensure that doesn’t happen.”
The reality in which Israel was seeking an accommodation, he elaborated, includes a situation in which even “the world that is friendly to Israel… that really supports Israel, when it speaks of the future, it speaks of Israel in terms of the ’67 borders. It speaks of the division of Jerusalem.”
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He said he was convinced, too, that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “has made the choice in his heart” between clinging to the “myth of the ‘right of return'” and the opportunity to establish a Palestinian state where all Palestinians, refugees included, would live.
“My impression is that he wants peace with Israel, and accepts Israel as Israel defines itself,” Olmert said. “If you ask him to say that he sees Israel as a Jewish state, he will not say that. But if you ask me whether in his soul he accepts Israel, as Israel defines itself, I think he does. That is not insignificant. It is perhaps not enough, but it is not insignificant.”
Bush was not pressuring Israel in any way, Olmert said. “He’s not doing a single thing that I don’t agree to,” he said. “He doesn’t support anything that I oppose.” Rather, Olmert said, both he and the president hoped that the Annapolis timetable, for an accord in the course of 2008, could be met.
Indeed, said the prime minister, there was currently an almost divinely ordained constellation of key personalities on the international stage favorably disposed to Israel, creating comfortable conditions for negotiations that might never be replicated.
“It’s a coincidence that is almost ‘the hand of God,'” Olmert said, “that Bush is president of the United States, that Nicolas Sarkozy is the president of France, that Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany, that Gordon Brown is the prime minister of England and that the special envoy to the Middle East is Tony Blair.”
When I even think of how things would be if we were dealing with people other than Mubarak, well, I pray every day for his well-being and good health,” he said.
The stuff on Abbas is laughable.
As I have written many times, the negotiations are all about ending the “occupation” and not peace and security.
IMRA puts it this way
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In the old days the retreat promoters argued that retreat would bring peace
and security. Now they know that this is a farce the public cannot accept.
So they came up with the voting argument.
