Neither Israel Not Palestinians Can Carry Out All Terms Of Roadmap

     AP     2003/08/4

Neither Israel nor the Palestinians can carry out all the terms of the U.S.-backed Roadmap peace plan, Israeli Interior Minister Avraham Poraz said Monday.

The plan calls for an end to nearly three years of violence and leads through three phases to creation of a Palestinian state in 2005. Both sides have accepted the plan, though Israel added a list of 14 qualifications.

Poraz, speaking in Jerusalem to the Foreign Press Association, said that while the Palestinians are unable to stop all terrorism, Israel cannot halt all construction in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

"So there is a balance," he said. "No one respects 100 percent of their obligations."

Poraz said that the will to arrive at an agreement is more important than specific points of a peace plan.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said repeatedly that the mistake that led to the collapse of the peace process that started in 1993 is that Israel did not insist that the Palestinians carry out each element of the successive agreements.

However, the Palestinians charged that Israel was to blame for not implementing the accords. The negotiations collapsed after an unsuccessful summit meeting with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton and leaders from the two sides at Camp David in July 2000, followed by the outbreak of violence in September 2000.

Previous peace efforts have degenerated into mutual bickering about which side has violated agreements more, instead of building trust with a series of incremental accords.

Under the Roadmap, the Palestinians are supposed to dismantle violent groups responsible for attacks against Israelis. However, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas refuses to disarm the groups by force, fearing a civil war.

Israel is to remove dozens of unauthorized settlement outposts in the West Bank and stop all construction in existing settlements. So far Israel has taken down only a few of the outposts, while settlers put up new ones to replace them. Also, Israel insists that it has a right to build inside existing settlements.