WASHINGTON, Dec 4: US President George Bush on Thursday threw his weight behind Secretary of State Colin Powell’s planned meeting with authors of a symbolic Middle East peace pact despite objections by Israel’s right-wing government.
“We appreciate people discussing peace. We just want to make sure people understand that the principles to peace are clear,” Mr Bush said in Washington of Mr Powell’s decision to receive dovish Israelis and Palestinians who drafted the “Geneva Initiative”.
Mr Bush said the blueprint was a useful exercise, although the US-sponsored roadmap remained his priority.
An aide to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suggested earlier that Washington would be interfering in domestic politics by giving a Washington stage to the Geneva initiators, fanning a rare public row between Israel and its closest ally.
Mr Powell said he would meet the Geneva Accord initiators on Friday despite the Sharon government’s view that this would lend unwarranted credence to the deal, hatched during a three-year vacuum of violence without serious talks by those in power.
“As ideas emerge, from whatever source, it seems to me not inappropriate to listen to the authors and proponents of these ideas,” Mr Powell said in Brussels.
The secretary said staff-level members of the Bush administration would meet Yossi Beilin, who negotiated abortive interim peace deals with Palestinians a decade ago, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, an old associate of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
BEDROCK GOALS: In Washington, Mr Bush said the Geneva plan was a productive undertaking as long as its drafters adhered to bedrock US principles of fighting violence, ensuring security and providing for the emergence of a free, democratic Palestinian state.
The deal would have Israel relinquish West Bank and Gaza territories occupied in the 1967 Middle East war to Palestinians to set up a state, also the end goal of the road map.
But unlike the vague roadmap it stipulates solutions to core disputes by mandating the removal of most Jewish settlements on occupied land that Sharon sees as essential to Israeli security, and giving Israel the right to decide how many Palestinian refugees of war to take back. Mr Arafat and Mr Qorei have welcomed the Geneva plan but not endorsed the details.—Reuters