May 14, 2002	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 1, 1423

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WASHINGTON, May 13: On the same day as Israel’s Likud Party rejected the very concept of a Palestinian state, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said he was prepared to accept the state of Israel.

In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Mr Arafat said the land of Israel and the Palestinian territories is “terra santa” — Latin for holy land — for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Any independent Palestinian state, he said, would have room for them all.

“We hope that we will have this independent Palestinian state side by side with an Israeli Jewish state,” he said. Asked whether he accepted the Jewish state of Israel, he replied, “Yes.”

“A part of the Jews are Palestinians, and they are represented in our legislative council,” Mr Arafat said. “Till now, we don’t call them Jews. Do you know what we call them? Our cousins.”

Since the Israeli siege of Mr Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah and the brutal Israeli attack on Jenin underlined the utter indefensibility of Sharon’s heavy-handed tactics, the Bush administration has launched an intensive diplomatic drive to separate the two sides in the Middle East, prevent further Arab alienation, and work towards a political solution, which is impossible without Israeli acceptance of a viable Palestinian state.

The Likud Party’s rejection of a Palestinian state has been interpreted by Monday’s US newspapers as part reflection of an internecine political skirmish in which Mr Sharon was outflanked by his main political rival, Binyamin Netanyahu.

The Washington Post reported that neither Mr Sharon nor Mr Netanyahu has any affection for an independent Palestine state, but each was forced by the exigencies of politics and diplomacy to accept the idea, the latter implicitly when he affirmed lukewarm support for the Oslo process and Mr Sharon explicitly when he said twice last year he would support a Palestinian state, although on extremely restrictive terms.

The Israeli paper Haaretz had said before the vote that a rejection of Palestinian statehood would mean “Likud’s return to the lost notion of a Greater Israel; the (Israeli) right’s return to the dead-end policy of perpetuating the occupation; and the negation of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.

Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat said the vote showed that the war being waged by Israel against the Palestinians is not a war against what they call terror; it’s really their war to maintain the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Rising concern and anger even among the so-called moderate Arab leaders were also evident in remarks made by King Abdullah of Jordan in a television interview here on Sunday. The king said if Osama bin Laden was alive, he was gaining adherents in the Middle East because of the Israeli incursions into the West Bank, and a US attack on Iraq would further destabilize the region.