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Condi: ready to crack the whip?
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| By israelinsider staff May 5, 2007 |
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Israel and the Palestinian Authority responded unenthusiastically to the US State Department's "ideas and suggestions" for reducing tensions. The US, for its part, backtracked from any intention to try an impose the measures on either party.
The detailed document, submitted last week to Israel and the Palestinians, calls on the Israelis to remove many checkpoints in Judea and Samaria, to expedite operations at Gaza crossings, and to permit bus convoys between Gaza and the "West Bank." The Palestinians are asked to halt rocket fire from Gaza and weapons smuggling into the Strip from Egypt.
Fawzi Baroum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza said Saturday that the terror group rejects a new American document detailing actions for both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to implement in the coming months. "The American plan is rejected and we will work to make it fail by any means and by all means," Baroum said, echoing comments by Hamas' Damascus-based political leader Khaled Meshal.
The Popular Resistance Committees terror group also dissed the document. "The U.S. plan does not serve our people's interests," PRC spokesman Abu Abeer said Saturday, vowing that "the [PRC] will work to make it fail."
Meshal, speaking at a rally in Syria on Friday, said that the Palestinians should not agree to halt rocket fire in exchange just for an easing of travel restrictions. "It's a farce ... the equation has now become: dismantling the checkpoints, in exchange for [giving up] resistance," he said in comments carried by Al-Jazeera. "This has become the Palestinian cause," he mockingly said.
However, Chief Palestine Liberation Organization negotiator Saeb Erekat said that the document would be presented to the PLO Executive Committee, the top decision-making body, for review on Saturday. Hamas, however, controls the Executive Committee so it is unlikely to be approved. On Sunday, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was to discuss the benchmarks document with Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.
State Department: Benchmarks won't be imposed
Deputy U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Friday that the United States would not impose on either side the demands listed in the document, nor impose deadlines for their implementation. "These are suggestions and ideas that we have circulated. It's not any kind of formal agreement nor is it something that is being enforced on anybody," he told reporters.
"There is no effort to try and say 'Next week, you'll do this, the week after that, you'll do that,'" Casey said. "The idea would be to do these in fairly quick order, though."
He said the measures would contiribute to implementing phase one of the "road map" peace plan for the region.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office, meanwhile said it could not commit to some of the demands, citing security concerns. Officials said Israel could not be expected to ease restrictions on Palestinian movements without assurances that Abbas has completed his own commitments on security.
Israel suggested a willingness to ease passage at some checkpoints, but expressed reservations about some demands, such as allowing Palestinian bus convoys to travel between Gaza and the West Bank by July 1, officials said.
"Some of the ideas Israel is already implementing, others are already well advanced, and there are some that Israel will not be able to address in the present because of security concerns," an official in Olmert's office said.
Israel is also not pleased by Washington's decision to hold limited contacts with non-Hamas ministers in the Palestinian unity government. The government has not responded officially to the document and an inter-ministerial discussion on it was postponed on Thursday. The government, rocked by the Winograd report, was preoccupied with internal affairs. The Prime Minister's Bureau is reportedly waiting for the positions of the defense establishment, Foreign Ministry and Shin Bet regarding the plan.
It won't be able to delay indefinitely. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to arrive on May 15 to discuss the plan.
Despite the State Department deniable of a strict schedule, the document reportedly sets a rigid timetable. The document was written by U.S. security coordinator Major General Keith Dayton, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dick Jones and U.S. Consul-General in Jerusalem Jacob Walles, and has Rice's approval. However, the timetable in the document is already running late, as some measures in it were scheduled to begin on May 1.
If both sides accept the document it will become a binding agreement. Currently it is formally considered a "proposal."
Israel expected to directly assist Abbas' forces
According to Haaretz, which said it was in possession of the document, the US proposal demands, among other things, that Israel approve and support in an "immediate and ongoing" manner the requests of U.S. security coordinator Dayton for the provision of required armaments, ammunition and equipment for security forces under the control of and reporting to the PA chairman.
The PA and its security forces, coordinated by national security adviser Mohammed Dahlan, are required to take a series of steps, limited by a timetable, including "developing a plan" against Qassam rockets with the support of Abbas no later than June 21, 2007. The president must deploy these forces no later than that date. The Palestinian forces are also supposed to act to prevent arms smuggling from Egypt. Israel is discussing with the European Union the extension of the European observers' mandate at the Rafah passage, a placement on which Israel's withdrawal from the Philadelphi route and the opening of the passage between Gaza and Egypt was conditioned.
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