Israel’s Ariel Sharon, buoyed in the polls after forming a new party for a March election, pledged on Thursday to seek peace with the Palestinians but stood firm on keeping many West Bank settlements.
The Israeli prime minister said his departure from the rightist Likud party last week to create a centrist movement meant he would no longer “waste time” battling opponents to his strategy for ending the Middle East conflict.
But Sharon, speaking to Israeli news editors, gave little idea how he planned to proceed, except to continue putting the onus on the Palestinian Authority to rein in militant groups before any serious political talks can resume.
Certain to anger the Palestinians was Sharon’s reaffirmation that Israel would never give up large settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank. He also said Israel would keep control of the Jordan Valley, where it maintains a string of smaller enclaves, under any future peace deal.
Sharon further ruled out any more unilateral withdrawals from occupied land after his Gaza pullout in September, which raised peace hopes internationally but also sparked a rebellion against him in the traditionally pro-settler Likud.
“I definitely plan to make every effort to promote the peace process starting with a political agreement,” Sharon said. “I would be prepared to make painful concessions ... (but) on issues of security there will be no compromise whatsoever.”
Laying election groundwork
After redrawing Israel’s political map, Sharon seemed to be laying the groundwork for his campaign for a March 28 general election, which opinion polls predict his new Kadima party will win handily.
The latest surveys show that Kadima would crush Likud and that the center-left Labor Party would claim second place, setting the stage for a new Sharon-led coalition government.
Sharon received a boost on Wednesday when veteran statesman Shimon Peres, bitter over his ouster as Labor Party chairman by trade-union chief Amir Peretz, quit his political home and threw his support behind the prime minister’s reelection bid.
Sharon vowed again on Thursday to stick to a U.S.-backed peace “road map”, which charts steps toward a Palestinian state, including the disarming of Palestinian militants and an end to Jewish settlement expansion.
However, the road map has been stalled by violence and non-compliance.
Sharon called on the Palestinian Authority to “avoid all the mistakes it has made” during the past five years of conflict.
But Palestinians say Israel’s continued building in major West Bank settlements remains one of the main obstacles to peace and threatens to prevent them from creating a viable state.
“There is no possibility that these settlement blocs will not exist under Israeli’s control,” Sharon said. “There is construction going on today ... There are areas that Israel must definitely hold onto.”
Sharon has also made clear that some isolated West Bank enclaves would have to be removed under any future peace deal, but he has avoided providing details.
Diplomacy best way to handle Iran
Sharon also said Thursday that he is confident all diplomatic efforts will be exhausted before any military action might be taken against the Iranian nuclear program.
When asked if any country is considering a strike against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, Sharon said: “I am sure that before anyone goes to take such steps, all attempts will be made to pressure Iran to stop all this activity.”
“We see that the pressures that are exerted can bear fruit,” Sharon told journalists in Tel Aviv.
Israel is preparing for the possibility that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons, but won’t lead the fight against the Islamic state’s nuclear ambitions, Sharon said.
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said earlier Thursday that the international community should use diplomacy to block Iran’s nuclear program. He denied that Israel, which bombed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor more than two decades ago, was considering attacking Iran.
“The position of the state of Israel is that the diplomatic track is the correct way to deal with the Iranian nuclear policies,” Mofaz told Army Radio.
Israel will make every effort to get the U.N. Security Council to pass resolutions to bring sanctions against Iran to pressure it to abandon the nuclear program, Mofaz said.
Fears of nuclear weapons
Israel and other countries claim Iran’s nuclear power program is a camouflage for developing nuclear weapons capabilities.
In 1981, Israeli warplanes destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor with a single strike. But experts say such a strike would be difficult, if not impossible, against Iran, because intelligence is weak and the Iranians have multiple nuclear installations, some of them underground.
Recent media reports said Germany agreed to sell Israel two Dolphin submarines that could be armed with nuclear weapons and used against Iran in the event of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel.
