By HERB KEINON AND DAVID HOROVITZ, JPOST
Vice Premier to ‘Post’: Palestinians already functioning like state.
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are doomed to hit a brick wall because no Palestinian leader will accept anything less than what Yasser Arafat rejected at Camp David 10 years ago, and no Jewish prime minister will offer anything more, Vice Premier and Regional Development Minister Silvan Shalom said Thursday in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.
“No matter what we do, I do not see a Palestinian leader who is willing to accept what Arafat rejected, and I don’t see a Jewish prime minister who can give more than what [Ehud] Barak offered. Therefore, I see it as a dead end,” he said.
At the same time, Shalom said he was in favor of the US-backed indirect talks because they may bring about a greater understanding between the sides.
“It is good that we are talking,” he said. “I am in favor of talking.”
But Shalom made clear it was important to have realistic expectations.
He characterized the US as Israel’s “only friend in the world, who provides diplomatic, military and economic support.” At the same time, he said, any attempt to impose a solution, by the US or any other player, won’t work “because no one will accept it. Israel will certainly not accept it.”
Shalom, who has refrained from granting extensive interviews since the 2009 elections, said that for all intents and purposes, the PA was already functioning like a de facto state.
“True, they don’t have borders,” he said, “but we also don’t have borders.”
Shalom said the proximity talks that US envoy George Mitchell was currently trying to launch were not even really proximity talks in the true sense of the word, but rather “bypass” talks. Proximity talks, he said, are when both sides sit in the same facility, “a hotel or Wye Plantation,” and the mediator passes messages from room to room. Even though Jerusalem is only 25 minutes from Ramallah, Mitchell’s current effort is not the same thing, he said.
According to Shalom, the focus of the current talks should be on economic projects, development of industrial areas, and joint projects in the spheres of electricity, sewage, water and infrastructure assistance. Likewise, he said, the talks should focus on increasing freedom of movement in the West Bank, through the lifting of roadblocks, and ways the Palestinians could fight terrorism and increase security.
Shalom said bluntly that he did not believe the Palestinians would ever recognize Israel as a Jewish state. But, he added, that is not the main barrier to an Israeli-Palestinian
A homicidal kleptocracy.
Kind of a Mansonville.
And that is with their baser instincts being suppressed by brutal Israeli occupation.
If the Israelis ever withdraw completely, watch the Palestinians annihilate each other.
It will make Bosnia look like a Cub Scout Jamboree.
Shalom is a Sephardic BB with even less honesty, less understanding,more gutless and were he to be PM would give away more than BB. While BB may be a political coward; Shalom is a gold-digging wannabe PM who will never make it, he is our perennial runnerup. He like BB are henpecked husbands ruled by their wives and in Shalom’s case his wife: is a wealthy clone of Forrest Gump, she and her family control ownership of Yedioth Ahronoth Israels largest and richest media conglomerate.
If anything he would be weaker and more treacherous than BB