Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon plans to hand over Arab Israeli towns to the Palestinians in exchange for settlement land in the West Bank in a future deal, his spokesperson Ranaan Gissin said on Tuesday.
”Sharon envisages territorial exchanges with the Palestinians as part of future permanent arrangements, under which Arab Israeli localities would pass under the sovereignty of the latter, while Jewish settlements [in the West Bank] would be integrated into Israeli territory,” Gissin said.
The spokesperson was commenting on an interview Sharon gave to the daily Maariv, which was published on Tuesday, in which the prime minister said he had ordered an examination of the legal basis for such a plan.
”It is complex,” Sharon was quoted as saying. ”It is not a question of transferring people from one place to another but a situation where people would remain in their homes with their property on their land, under another sovereignty.”
Gissin added: ”These exchanges can only take place if we have a Palestinian partner and terrorism is stifled. It will then be possible to have two states, Israel and the Palestinian state, coexisting peacefully side by side.”
The spokesperson charged that ”Palestinians hoping to conquer Israel with the demographic bomb are obviously opposed” to such a land swap, referring to the faster birthrate of Arabs living in Israel than the Jews.
Most Arab Israeli towns are in the north of the country. Some, like Umm el-Fahm, lie right on the Green Line dividing Israel from the West Bank, but the largest, Nazareth, is more than 20km away. — Sapa-AFP