Downing Street Says » Middle East Peace Process

Asked what the Prime Minister thought of the realignment plan, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) said this was a case of getting horses and carts in the right order. The Prime Minister had said that the first priority was a negotiated settlement and he had set out why a negotiated settlement was in the interests of everybody, including Israel. A negotiated settlement would stick. Almost more importantly, if you could say such a thing, was that Prime Minister Olmert had said the exact same thing as he had also said at the White House. The priority therefore was not to jump ahead of where we were, but rather put all the effort behind the negotiated settlement. That was in the end what would work best. Having said that we recognised that for that to happen Israel had to have a viable negotiating partner on the Palestinian side. Prime Minister Olmert had made it clear this was his approach. It was right to focus primarily on what Prime Minister Olmert believed his first priority to be – a negotiated settlement. We would do everything we could to help persuade the Palestinians to become the viable negotiating partner that Israel needed.

Asked if the Prime Minister had been making a moral comparison between Palestinian rocket attacks and the Israeli shelling, the PMOS said the first thing, as both Prime Ministers had said, was to recognise the sadness with which any death occurred whether on the Israeli or the Palestinian side. Secondly, however, everyone needed to recognise that the focus should be on getting negotiations started that would make such things a thing of the past. Part of the obligations on the Palestinian side was to do all it could to stop such attacks happening from Palestinian territory. We had made our position clear on the need for restraint on the Israeli side as well. In the meantime people would have to wait and see what the investigation found.

Asked if the Prime Minister had shifted from the 1967 border commitment in UN resolution 242, the PMOS said that it was part of the road map that final status negotiations were for the final status negotiation. Therefore it was clearly important that they were able to take place. It was important that people did not take up positions now but got the negotiations underway. Only that, not restating positions, would lead to final status negotiations. This was why we believed that now was the time for everybody to become part of the negotiations. People could no longer condone violence because the impact of that was to get into an all to familiar vicious cycle of violence. People needed to recognise what everybody knew the solution had to be – a peaceful two state solution.

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» Monday, June 12, 2006

Middle East Peace Process

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