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Clinton to talk peace on first visit to Israel
2009-03-02
JERUSALEM, (AFP) - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is due to meet Israeli leaders at the start of her first official Middle East visit aiming to focus on hobbled peace talks while her hosts hope to switch attention to Iran. Clinton arrived in key ally Israel from Egypt, where she told a conference on Gaza reconstruction that rebuilding the Palestinian enclave after Israel's deadly war could not be separated from the Middle East peace process. "Our response to today's crisis in Gaza cannot be separated from our broader efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace," she said in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh at a conference attended by delegates from more than 70 countries and organisations. "By providing humanitarian assistance to Gaza, we also aim to foster conditions in which a Palestinian state can be fully realised," she said. Clinton later told a news conference she was troubled by continuing rocket fire from Gaza, and urged all parties to work towards a lasting truce. "But it is very difficult for any country to just sit and take rockets falling on its people, that is the crux of the Israeli problem. How are they supposed to respond when they continue to have that kind of attack?" she said. Establishing a Palestinian state is not a priority in Israel, where the next government is likely to be a right-wing coalition opposed to the idea and where officials have repeatedly pointed to the threat of a nuclear Iran as their main concern. "Israel will underline the gravity of the Iranian nuclear threat" and reaffirm its opposition to any contacts with the Islamist Hamas movement running Gaza, spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP. The visit "will be an occasion to meet with the next Israeli leadership and take stock with the outgoing government of the state of peace negotiations with the Palestinians," Palmor said. Clinton's visit comes at a time when Israel's relations with its main ally Washington are in flux. While President Barack Obama has vowed to pursue peace talks vigorously and has put together an impressive team to work towards that goal, presumptive Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes a Palestinian state in the short term and is mostly concerned with Iran. When he was premier previously, Netanyahu put the brakes on the Oslo peace process in 1996. "Iran is seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon and constitutes the gravest threat to our existence since the war of independence," he said on February 20 after being charged with forming the next cabinet. He favours a broad-based government, but the centrist Kadima party has refused to join a Netanyahu cabinet because of differences over the peace process, and he now looks set to lead a right-wing coalition in which most partners oppose a Palestinian state. Underscoring the potential for division between the new US and Israeli administrations, the anti-settlement Peace Now group said in a report released on Monday that the housing ministry has plans that would nearly double the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. Israeli settlements there have long been one of the main obstacles to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Peace Now said government plans, most of which have not yet received the green light, look to build 73,000 new homes in the West Bank. "If all the plans are realised, the number of settlers in the territories will be doubled" to more than 570,000, the group said. "The completion of these projects will make the plan of creating a Palestinian state next to Israel totally unrealistic," Peace Now head Yariv Oppenheimer told army radio. Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have languished for years. They screeched to a halt after the collapse of the Camp David summit in 2000 and the Taba summit in 2001, and have made no visible progress since being relaunched in November 2007. They have been on ice since Israel's Gaza offensive in December and January. French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters that Clinton believes "time is playing against peace" in the region and called for initiatives to jump-start negotiations. Asked in Egypt if she intended to put pressure on Israeli leaders, Clinton said: "We will be discussing specific policies with the new government whenever it is formed. "It is important that Israel work with its responsible Palestinian partners including (Palestinian president Mahmud) Abbas and (prime minister Salam) Fayyad," she added.
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