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At the Foreign Ministry in Berlin on Thursday. (AP)
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners March 30, 2006 |
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President George W. Bush on Wednesday called acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to invite him to visit Washington after he forms his government, the White House said.
During the call, which lasted fewer than five minutes, Bush congratulated Olmert on his party coming in first in the election, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
"The two leaders talked about Prime Minister (Ariel) Sharon's leadership and expressed their continued concern for his health," McClellan said.
Olmert's Kadima Party has declared victory in Tuesday's elections.
On Wednesday, Germany and France welcomed the outcome of Israel's parliamentary elections.
"I think we can interpret (the results) thus: that the voters in Israel want progress on the road to peace and security," Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the German parliament.
"I welcome the fact that Olmert in his first public comments indicated readiness to restart peace talks," Steinmeier said. "We will do all we can together with our partners to support a peace solution on the basis of the 'road map,"' the stalled U.S. and European-backed plan for peace.
Steinmeier's spokesman, Martin Jaeger, said the minister was pleased by the performance of Kadima and Labor.
"With this, it should be possible to form a government from the center ... that can certainly give positive stimuli to the further progress of the peace process," he told reporters.
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called the election results "good news for peace."
Douste-Blazy, speaking on LCI television, said that while Olmert is "a man of unilateral policies, ... he has always wanted to recognize the existence of two peoples, two states that live in security and peace one next to the other. This is good news for peace."
Speaking to reporters later, Douste-Blazy said the world community cannot let up its support for the Palestinian people.
"We must work towards the economic development of Gaza and the West bank because it would be a major political error" not to do so, Douste-Blazy said. "If there is no plan for the 50 to 100 percent of young people who are unemployed in Gaza, there will never, never be peace."
He said the international community should demand that Hamas recognize Israel but also ask Israel to recognize the so-called road map for peace and not to impose policies on the Palestinians.
EU hails Olmert's election win as new chance to breathe life into "peace process"
The European Union on Wednesday hailed the election victory of acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party as an opportunity to breathe new life into stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Behind the scenes, however, EU diplomats were more pessimistic.
Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, said he phoned Olmert to congratulate him on his victory.
"I encouraged Mr. Olmert to pursue all efforts to move toward a peaceful, negotiated resolution of the Middle-East conflict," Solana said in a statement. "I assured him that the European Union stands ready, as always, to offer all its support in this process."
EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said the 25-nation EU "looks forward to working with" the new Israeli government and hoped the two new governments in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, while far apart in their views, could move together to bring peace to the region.
"Taken together with the recent Palestinian elections, the vote in Israel will have a shaping influence on the prospects for moving toward a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Ferrero-Waldner said in a statement.
"We might be moving to a situation of no-peace, no-war and we might be moving to a situation of a stalemate and more and more separation between the two sides and no peace process," acknowledged one EU diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity, due to the sensitivity of the issue.
"Now we might be moving to a totally different situation where there is going to be no implementation of the roadmap."
"I don't think the roadmap is alive," said Jacob Feldt, Mideast expert at the University of Southern Denmark's Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies. "Europe and America have to accept that negotiations will take place within the Israeli agenda, and that is what Olmert has declared. It's a pretty locked-up agenda."
Antonio Missiroli, from the Brussels-based European Policy Center, said the EU will seek to keep the peace plan alive as some sort of framework for future negotiations. The EU helped draft the roadmap with the United Nations, the United States and Russia.
"It is of no interest of anyone to declare it dead, rather to find ways to revive it at some point in time," said Missiroli.
Others were more optimistic that Hamas could moderate under international pressure, live up to demands it recognize Israel as a peace partner and drop its militant wing.
Stephen Twigg, director of the Foreign Policy Center, a European think-tank based in London, said similarly it took the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which includes the Fatah party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, some time to recognize Israel. "Once the political will was there things moved very quickly."
To push the new Hamas-led Palestinian Authority to moderate, the EU and the United States and other Western donors are threatening to cut off crucial aid.
AP contributed to this report.
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