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| Middle East |
| Yasser: 'Yes, thank you. We'd really like the Clinton plan.' |
| 2002-06-21 |
| Paleostinian Chairman-for-Life Yasser Arafat (1929-2002?) is prepared to accept a Mideast peace plan put forward by then-United States President Bill Clinton in December 2000. In an interview at his Ramallah headquarters, Arafat replied to Ha'aretz reporter Akiva Eldar that he would take the Clinton plan without changes. "I am prepared to accept it, absolutely," Eldar quoted Arafat as saying, and he endorsed the points of the plan one by one, Eldar said. And now wait for the punch line... Arafat, asked by reporters if he was now ready to accept the points of Clinton's plan, appeared puzzled, saying "Clinton? There is no plan for Clinton." Toldja his mind's going, if it's not gone already. "There were talks under the supervision of Clinton, and we reached very important and basic points in Taba (discussions that followed), and this is well known," he said before Friday prayers at his headquarters. "God, please don't let them shell my bedroom again!" Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh said the Palestinians "are dealing positively" with all past peace initiatives, including those by Clinton, but noted Israel's position changed after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's election. The Palestinians want to pick up where those proposals left off. And see what else they can get. Perhaps they shoulda said so sometime last year... Arafat said Israel would receive sovereignty over the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem and the Western Wall, the last remaining remnant of the compound where the biblical Jewish Temples stood, Judaism's holiest site. Arafat said he would be prepared for modifications in the line between Israel and the West Bank and exchanges of territory with Israel, principles the Palestinians have balked at up to now. The official Palestinian demand has been that Israel must pull back to the 1949 cease-fire line, relinquishing all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem and dismantling all Jewish settlements there. 105mm, HE, right through the wall, across the bedroom, out the opposite wall. Sounded like a very fast freight train... Arafat did not repeat the demand for the right of return of all the refugees and their families to Israel, Eldar said. Instead, he said, a solution must be found for the 200,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, adding that he was calling on European and other world bodies to help. Israel has refused to take in large numbers of refugees. Lebanon says there are 350,000 refugees there. Those are all things that can be discussed. Normal people don't discuss things with dynamite. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |