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07.01.04, 09:10
Arutz Sheva IsraelNationalNews.com
Ex-Mossad Chief Halevy: Road Map Irrelevant, PA Aiming For One-State Solution
Ephraim Halevy, former head of the Mossad Intelligence Agency and former
director of the National Security Council, stated the Road Map plan presented
by the United States will not work. Halevy stated that Israel, the PA, and
the US are fully aware of that fact.
Currently in charge of the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies at the
Hebrew University's School of Public Policy, Halevy was invited to address
the Foreign Press Association today (Tuesday).
Halevy said the Palestinian Authority cannot confront, dismantle and disarm
militant groups as the road map demands. In addition, the plan's timeline -
which calls for a preliminary Palestinian state by 2003 and a permanent
entity by 2005 - is irrelevant, he said.
Responding line by line to the four-page document jointly drawn up by the
United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, Halevy
attacked the plan's inconsistencies and incongruities. It was a "strategic
mistake" for Israel to have accepted the document, he said, adding that
Israel's 14 official reservations are meaningless.
"The road map... cannot be implemented. It can not be implemented. We know
this, and the Palestinians know this, and the United States knows this,"
Halevy told the group of foreign journalists.
Halevy said it did not seem as though the Palestinian Authority has any
desire for a state at this point, noting they have taken almost none of the
steps necessary to set up the offices, bureaucracy, or legal and security
networks needed to run a country. He said one of the reasons the PA is so
relaxed about setting up the infrastructure necessary to establish a state is
because they believe that time is on their side.
Halevy believes there has been a shift away from the phased-plan of using a
Palestinian state to launch further attacks on Israel to a patient hold-out
for an Arab majority between the Jordan and Mediterranean thereby creating a
Palestinian state from the river to the sea. “Yasser Arafat has said very
often that the future of the conflict will be decided in the womb of the
Palestinian mother," Halevy said. There are Palestinians who believe "one
should drag your feet... and bide time until these processes reach fruition."
Faced with a steady flow of Israeli concessions and the leverage of a
demographic conquest, the PA is therefore seen by Halevy as uninterested in a
state covering ‘only’ Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza).
"I think that is the strategy which causes the continued support for
terrorist attacks," Halevy said.
