Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday Israel must give up most of the Palestinian territories it has occupied since 1967, including east Jerusalem, if it wants peace.
”If we are determined to preserve the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel, we must inevitably relinquish, with great pain, parts of our homeland, and we must relinquish Arab neighbourhoods in Jerusalem,” said Olmert.
”Waiting unnecessarily to make a decision will change the delicate balance in the international community, which currently adheres to the notion of two states for two people with defined, agreed-upon, internationally recognised borders,” he said.
Olmert spoke at a ceremony marking the 13th anniversary of the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist opposed to any territorial concessions to the Palestinians.
Yigal Amir, who is serving a life sentence for the killing, never expressed regret.
”The shots fired in a cowardly manner in the back of Yitzhak have not killed the path to peace which he mapped out,” Israeli President Shimon Peres said at the ceremony.
Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who is now a representative of the Middle East quartet of international peace mediators, was also among the dignitaries attending the ceremony.
Rabin is revered as a national hero, both for his legendary career as army chief and for peace efforts in the 1990s that earned him a Nobel peace prize shared with Peres and the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.
The Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, was to hold a special tribute to Rabin later on Monday. The session will be the Knesset’s last before snap elections are held on February 10. — AFP
