The British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, pressed Israel to re-embrace the road map to peace on a visit to Jerusalem on Wednesday. But although diplomats said there were signs of greater Israeli flexibility since the death of Yasser Arafat, its foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, repeated that the Palestinians must first ”end terror”.
Straw is expected in the West Bank today to meet the new Palestinian leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, who is favoured to win the January election to head the Palestinian Authority.
Straw will lay a wreath at Arafat’s grave in Ramallah.
His meeting with Ariel Sharon was cancelled on Wednesday: the Israeli prime minister’s office said he had lost his voice. But Straw did meet Shalom, and afterwards he welcomed the Palestinian elections and Sharon’s plan to withdraw all Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, saying that they laid the basis for faster progress on the road map.
But Shalom said: ”There are sadly no shortcuts to achieving peace, nor are there any magic recipes to ensure positive movement. Progress toward peace requires that terrorism be brought to an end and for negotiations between the sides to be resumed.
”This is the sequence set down in the road map and this is the sequence that must be followed.”
Shalom sought to characterise Abbas’s comment that he would ”fulfil [Arafat’s] dream” and refuse to surrender territory or the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as an endorsement of terrorism.
”We are very sorry about the last statements that were made by Mahmoud Abbas about the necessity of the Palestinians to keep the heritage of Arafat that was involved with terrorism, as we know, most of the time,” he said.
Straw said it should be expected that both sides would peg out positions which they would later modify.
”We all have to accept, as we do, that each party to these negotiations — Israel on the one hand, Palestinians on the other — have their politics and the aspirations of their people and they have to be dealt with and accommodated as each side is gradually moving towards the only solution that is sensible, which is a peaceful one along the lines set out in security council resolutions and above all in the road map.”
He said that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was his priority, because of its impact on other violence in the region.
”Its effect is so powerful that to resolve it would be a huge prize,” he said.
But British officials played down the prospects of Tony Blair’s wished-for Middle East conference, saying it was more likely to evolve into a series of discussions aimed at pushing forward particular issues.
Asked about Israel’s failure to meet its road-map commitment to end the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Shalom at first denied that construction was continuing, before offering a more revealing answer.
”I don’t see anything new in what is taking place now there in the settlements,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â