Olmert: Israel must quit East Jerusalem and Golan

[yurbud]

Source: Haaretz

Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in remarks published Monday that Israel would have to withdraw from East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights if it was serious about making peace with the Palestinians and Syria.

In an interview with the Yedioth Aharonoth daily, Olmert said that as a hard-line politician for decades he had not been prepared to look at reality in all of its depth.

"Ariel Sharon spoke about painful costs and refused to elaborate," Olmert told the daily. "I say, we have no choice but to elaborate. In the end of the day, we will have to withdraw from the most decisive areas of the territories. In exchange for the same territories left in our hands, we will have to give compensation in the form of territories within the State of Israel."

***


In exchange for the settlement enclaves, Olmert has proposed about a 5 percent land swap giving the Palestinians a desert territory adjacent to the Gaza Strip, as well as land on which to build a transit corridor between Gaza and the West Bank.


Read more: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1025411.html

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I wonder what will happen to him because of this. Israeli peacemakers seem to have abbreviated lifespans.

[rateyes]

1. IOW, Jimmy Carter is right. nt

[jeff30997]

2. "Israeli peacemakers seem to have abbreviated lifespans."

So true.I was really shocked when Rabin was assassinated. :(

"Yitzhak Rabin (1 March 1922 – 4 November 1995) was an Israeli politician and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974-1977 and 1992 until his assassination in 1995. In 1994, Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize together with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat. He was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli radical opposed to Rabin's signing of the Oslo Accords. Rabin was the first native-born prime minister of Israel, the only prime minister to be assassinated and the second to die in office after Levi Eshkol.

In 2005, Rabin was voted the greatest Israeli to ever live."

A great man that could have change History.

[yurbud]

5. Sharon surprising changed his tune too--then stroked out

[DRex]

3. Amazed to hear Olmert talk some sense....

No one states the obvious on the Israel/Palestine problem, not on this side of the debate anyway. If only Israeli statesmen had the courage to say these things when they are taking office, not leaving it.

[Scurrilous]

4. Israel: Olmert's intriguing swan song

<sip>

"The Jewish new year celebration Rosh Hashana, which started Monday and ends Wednesday night, is meant to be a time of self-reflection and atonement for prior sins.

Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seems to be taking that requirement quite seriously lately.

Olmert, who resigned about 10 days ago but remains as a caretaker until a new government forms, has been on a self-reflection and atonement kick lately. In the process he has issued harsh critiques of Israeli political psychology and confessed to the wrongness of some of the policies he held dear during a 35-year political career.

In an interview published Monday in the Yediot Aharanoth newspaper, Olmert flatly stated that Israel would have to give up the vast majority of the occupied West Bank and accept the division of Jerusalem in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians.

Calling it "a decision we have been refusing for 40 years to look at open-eyed," Olmert all but apologized for his long-standing opposition to any division of Jerusalem. "For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at the reality in all its depth."

He went on to state that Israel should give the Golan Heights back to Syria in order to achieve peace there and spoke out harshly against any local sentiment to preemptively attack Iranian nuclear sites."

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