PLO negotiator claims Palestinian state key to Mideast stability
Saeb Erekat warns that 'If Israel is allowed to continue its colonization and Apartheid policies in Palestine, the future will be more extremism and bloodshed.'
The chief Palestinian negotiator claimed on Friday that ''the main requirement for regional peace and stability is peace between Israelis and Palestinians."
Representatives from some 30 different countries met on Friday in Paris to discuss the French peace initiative that seeks to create the conditions for the renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
"The Paris Meeting is a very significant step and its message is clear: If Israel is allowed to continue its colonization and Apartheid policies in Occupied Palestine, the future will be for more extremism and bloodshed rather than for coexistence and peace," Saeb Erekat said.
"What is required," he went on to say, "is a genuine mechanism to fully end the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 and to solve all final status issues based on international law; including a clear and limited timeframe for its implementation."
"We negotiated bilaterally with Israel, the occupying power, for over two decades, but they continue to violate all the agreements that we had signed. In fact the number of illegal Israeli settlers in Occupied Palestine has grown from nearly 200,000 to over 600,000 during the past 20 years of bilateral talks," Erekat added.
He called on the international community to stop "treating Israel as if it's a state above the law," and said that the region's future remains in jeopardy so long as the Palestinians are "not treated with dignity," adding that the Middle East will remain unstable so long as the Israeli-Palestinian issue remains unresolved.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called Abbas on Friday evening to give him an update on the conference. Ayrault, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, told Abbas that the French envoy to the peace process will arrive in the region soon to promote the French initiative.
According to the Wafa report, Abbas told Ayrault that the Palestinian leadership is committed to the two-state solution and was willing to cooperate with the international community on the issue.
Meanwhile, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki claimed that "some countries interfered to ensure the Paris conference's concluding statement will not include clear positions on the peace process, not even a timetable."
He also criticized the fact the concluding statement did not include any mention of Israeli construction in the settlements, which he said threatened the two-state solution.
Israel, which opposed the French initiative from its conception, called the conference a "missed opportunity," arguing that instead of urging Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to immediately start direct negotiations with no preconditions with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the international community has "given into Abbas's demands and is enabling him to avoid bilateral direct negotiations."
"The pages of history will mark this Paris conference as a conference which enables the Palestinians to toughen their position and push peace further away," Israel's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
