Sharon rejects land for peace approach, says aide

[Violet_Crumble]

Ariel Sharon no longer regards big compromises over land as being crucial to setting up an independent Palestinian state, says one of the Israeli prime minister's closest political advisers.
The day after Mr Sharon broke from the ruling Likud party to launch a new political movement ahead of a general election on March 28, the adviser, Eyal Arad, said the Israeli leadership had repudiated the central belief of years of negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - that giving up land would buy peace.

Mr Arad, the prime minister's strategic policy adviser who was among those who urged the leader to quit Likud, said that Mr Sharon considered the 1993 Oslo accords, which sought peace based on Israel surrendering the territories occupied in 1967, as failed and discredited. Mr Arad said the Israeli leadership had interpreted the US-led "road map" for peace as laying out an alternative philosophy of "security for independence", meaning a "total end of the terrorist war" in return for a "Palestinian national home" but not necessarily based on the 1967 borders.

Palestinian officials described Mr Arad's view as an attempt to assert that Israel's efforts to impose de facto borders, using the West Bank barrier and settlement expansion, were not jeopardising peace. It was also in line with Mr Sharon's contention that the core of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians was not the occupation but Islamic terrorism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1648629,00.html

[bemildred]

1. More bullshit from one of the Princes of bullshit.

Jabba never did buy the "land for peace" approach.

[Wordie]

2. As early as the '70s, many on the Pals side believed that the Israeli

strategy was to simply wait out the process, until everyone had forgotten the roots of the problem, all the while incrementally taking more land.

The events of the more than 30 years since then seem to have proven them to be correct in their assessment. That Sharon "...no longer regards big compromises over land as being crucial to setting up an independent Palestinian state," seems only to further confirm this.

Why is it that our own country seems to confirm that the Pals aren't living up to the roadmap (terrorism), but doesn't put equal pressure on Israel for not living up to the roadmap (continued building of illegal settlements)?