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TEL AVIV, Jan 29: Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said on Wednesday that he was willing to meet Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon immediately and to return to negotiations to end more than two years of conflict.
“Tonight!” Arafat told Israel’s Channel Ten television in an interview when asked if he would sit down with Sharon following his victory in Tuesday’s election. “We insist on returning to negotiations as soon as possible.”
Arafat also said, in response to a question, that he was willing to call for a general truce.
“Don’t forget we have announced this more than once. In all the areas. We were clear and we hope alongside this there will be an immediate implementation of peace in the land of peace,” he said.
There was no immediate comment from Mr Sharon, who has all along refused to meet Arafat.
Sharon’s right-wing Likud party romped to victory in Tuesday’s general election on a wave of support for his tough approach to the Palestinian uprising.
“We respect democracy and this Israeli choice,” Arafat said of the election.
Hundreds of Israelis have been killed in scores of suicide bombings carried out by militants at the forefront of the uprising.
Sharon accuses Arafat of fomenting attacks on Israel. Arafat denies it.
ARAB REACTION: The Likud’s landslide election victory in Israeli election was met with resignation by Arab leaders, except for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who reportedly has agreed to meet the right-wing leader.
“The Israeli position will remain the same, unfortunately,” Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa told reporters.
For Mussa, Israeli policy in the Middle East will evolve when Israel finally accepts “to establish a balanced peace and deal with the Palestinians as a partner and neighbour who have the right to proclaim their independent state.”
The position of the Arabs toward the peace process, as Sharon seeks allies to form a new coalition government, is “constant, and based on the Arab peace initiative,” Mussa said.
This peace initiative, adopted by the Arab summit in Beirut last year, calls for establishing normal ties between the Arabs and Israel in exchange for the Jewish state’s withdrawal from all land occupied in 1967.
The Palestinian Authority’s representative in France, Leila Shahid, wondered about the future of the so-called peace camp after the defeat of the Labour-led left.
“We must give thought about the future to see if we can rebuild a peace camp, which, obviously, was destroyed today at the parliamentary level,” Shahid said in Paris.
And the representative to Lebanon of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, Sultan Abul Aynaina, believed that Sharon’s victory dashed any hopes for reviving negotiations.
“From now on, anybody who bets on new peace negotiations would be committing a mistake,” he said.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud said that Mr Sharon’s resounding election victory proves that the Jewish state has no interest in making peace with the Palestinians.
“Sharon’s re-election proves that Israel is not ready to or does not hope to reach a just and comprehensive peace with the Palestinians based on international legitimacy,” Hammoud said.
Hammoud deplored the fact that the “international community does not call Israel to account for the massacre of innocents and destruction that it commits.
In Damascus, the Al-Baath newspaper, the organ of the Syrian ruling party, said, “The results of the Israeli elections are not important, because all the Israeli leaders are sides of the same coin.”
The elections “are only a game where roles are swapped to prove who will employ more terrorism and commit more crimes” against the Palestinians, the daily charged.—AFP
