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Ariel Sharon, laughing: "In this country, we don't fire a minister every day, only from time to time." (AP)
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners February 15, 2005 |
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| Sharon with his fleet of bodyguards this week (AP) |
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Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Tuesday that Israel is standing at a crossroads of peace after last week's summit meeting in Egypt but failed to convince Russia to stop a planned sale of missiles to Syria.
Israel also did not make a scheduled handover of Jericho to the Palestinian Authority due to a dispute over the scope of the Israeli retreat.
The Prime Minister seemed unsure responding to journalists' questions, reading from a prepared text in halting English, but evoked laughter when he said he had no immediate plans to fire Minister Silvan Shalom. "In this country, we don't fire a minister every day, only from time to time," he said with a chuckle, to the laughter of the assembled media.
Addressing the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, Sharon said that the summit showed that there can be progress toward peace if violence is ended.
At the summit a week ago, Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas declared a truce to end more than four years of bloodshed.
Sharon said he had sent a letter to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin calling on Russia to cancel its planned sale of advanced missiles to Syria. Sharon said his office received a reply, and while he had not seen it, "I understand that they are going to sell this kind of weapon to the Syrians."
He said, "We of course worry about that, and don't think that should have happened." He warned that such weapons could "fall into the hands of the terrorist organizations," despite Putin's assurances.
Alongside measures to cement the truce, Sharon is also dealing with increasingly harsh opposition to his plan to dismantle all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank in the summer. Extremists have sent death threats to some Israeli Cabinet ministers.
Sharon said "we needed to take painful steps" toward peace, referring to his pullout plan, but he hoped to prevent a rift among his people. He said Israel is prepared to make "painful compromises for peace, but it will not make any compromises with terror."
Reading from a prepared text in response to a question, he said, "the only thing that concerns me is how to progress and not to delay." Concerning the alleged threat from "Jewish extremists," he said, "I have never given in to threats, and I will not start now."
He said he hoped that after the Israeli pullout, Gaza would be under the control of the Palestinian Authority and not Hamas or Islamic Jihad. He said that coordination of the pullout with Palestinian officials has begun, but warned that Israel would respond harshly against Palestinian violence during the evacuation.
"Disengagement from Gaza will be coordinated with the Palestinians," Sharon said, in his clearest statement yet on the subject.
Sharon said his plan would solidify Israel's grip on main settlement blocs in the West Bank, which "will be part of the Jewish state in the future."
He said no peace plan cold be imposed on Israel, insisting on sticking with the internationally backed "road map" plan. However, he said, negotiations have not resumed on the road map plan. He hoped the two sides were on the way to talking about the plan.
Asked about Monday's assassination in Beirut of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, he said, "Israel is a peace-seeking country that strives to achieve peace with all Arab countries, including Syria."
He said it was "unnecessary to respond" to accusations about Israeli complicity in the assassination. He said Lebanon is under full Syrian control.
He said Lebanon is a center of terrorist activity, but "to say we are happy about that, we are not. It should not have happened."
"We don't know yet who did it," he said.
He charged that Palestinian terror groups are headquartered in Syria, and in cooperation with Iran, directs Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
"Syria must allow the Lebanese army to deploy its forces along the border with Israel," he said, and remove its forces from Lebanon in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559.
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