Posted on 03/15/2009 7:47:11 AM PDT by SJackson
Days before the expected end of his premiership, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert blasted the Palestinian leadership for lacking the courage to make peace with Israel.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during Sunday's cabinet meeting. Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
SLIDESHOW: Israel & Region | World "I have held contacts with the head of the Palestinian Authority," the prime minister said at Sunday's cabinet meeting. "I have no doubt that these contacts have formed conditions conducive to signing a peace agreement."
"I said it in the past and I do not hesitate to repeat it: The State of Israel will have to make unprecedented dramatic and very painful concessions in order to achieve peace, but the fact that we have not yet achieved this is first and foremost a result of the weakness, lack of will and lack of courage of Palestinian leaders to reach an agreement," Olmert said. "Everything else is excuses and attempts to deflect attention from the main issue. We were ready to sign a peace agreement; the Palestinians, to my regret, did not have the courage to do so."
Olmert said Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had made "great, detailed, complex and wide-ranging efforts, the likes of which have not been seen in a long time," in talks with the Palestinians, and that no future government would be able to hold peace negotiations without the foundations she had put in place.
In January, Olmert reportedly outlined to US Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell the list of concessions Israel was willing to make in order to sign a peace agreement, and this reportedly went even further than former prime minister Ehud Barak's offer to Yasser Arafat in 2001 to establish a state on 98 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza.
In what is likely to be the current cabinet's last regular meeting, Olmert also mentioned the two military campaigns of his tenure, against Hamas and Hizbullah, maintaining that the war in the North ended in an "unprecedented achievement."
"The North is quiet. There is no firing. There is no threat," he said. "Many people are living quietly. The North is prospering."
The prime minister called the recent operation in Gaza, an "important and successful effort," stressing that "it has yet to be finished."
"It has yet to reach full fruition vis-a-vis the achievements that we expected," he said. "But we reached very significant achievements and restored the international awareness of the strength of the IDF and of Israel's deterrence."
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Gosh, he talked to them, years worth, said all the right things, and they don't want peace? What could the problem be? I'm sure Hillary and BHO will be able to help, they're good talkers too, in their own minds.
Ohmert is living in a fantasy world if he thinks the Palestinians really want peace. If they did, it would have happened long before this. By the Palestinians voting in Hamas, they have effectively shown they have never wanted peace and do not want peace now or in the future and if Israel ever elects a leader that thinks they do, then Israel will deserve anything that happens to it.
It worked really well in GAZA didn't it.
The more that Israel gives up the more blood thirsty the Palies get.
Maybe if they make GAZA a parking lot they will get some attention, probably not.
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