Palestijnse minister-president Haniya wijst ons op het grotere verband van de huidige crisis. Er moet meer gebeuren dan alleen noodhulp en het stoppen van de invasies.
Haniyeh: Must resolve issues from 1948 to achieve peace
By Haaretz Service
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said in remarks published Tuesday that only through resolving the “core issues” dating from 1948 rather than “the secondary ones from 1967,” can there be “a fair and permanent peace” between Israel and the Palestinians.
In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Haniyeh puts forward a formula to facilitate the resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
“The dispute is not only about Gaza and the West Bank,” Haniyeh writes, “it is a wider national conflict that can be resolved only by addressing the full dimensions of Palestinian national rights in an integrated manner. This means statehood for the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Arab East Jerusalem, and resolving the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue fairly, on the basis of international legitimacy and established law.”
Only once “this tremendous labor has begun,” he states, can there be “meaningful negotiations with a non-expansionist, law-abiding Israel.”
The Palestinian prime minister, a senior official in the ruling Hamas party, lists “Palestinian priorities” as including “recognition of the core dispute over the land of historical Palestine and the rights of all its people; resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks, assassinations and military expansion.”
He accuses Israel of using the abduction of one of its soldiers by the Hamas military wing, among others, as a “pretext for a job scheduled months ago.”
This job, he says, is to “destroy the results of fair and free elections held early this year,” in which his party rose to power, ousting Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement.
Since then, the West has clamped sanctions on the PA, due to Hamas’ refusal to renounce violence, recognize Israel or abide by previously signed peace agreements.
The Gaza incursion sparked by the kidnap of Corporal Gilad Shalit, Haniyeh writes, “is the explosive follow-up to a five-month campaign of economic and diplomatic warfare directed by the United States and Israel.”