By Sharon Sadeh
BLACKPOOL, England - British Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday that Israel and Iraq must both obey UN Security Council resolutions, and called for final status negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians to begin before the end of the year.
Blair has been under heavy criticism from left-wingers in his Labor Party for threatening war in Iraq while making no effort to end Israeli-Palestinian violence. He said UN resolutions must be implemented across the Middle East, not just in Baghdad.
“Yes, what is happening in the Middle East now is ugly and wrong - the Palestinians living in increasingly abject conditions, humiliated and hopeless. Israeli civilians brutally murdered,” he told Labor’s annual conference. “I agree, United Nations resolutions should apply” there, as well. “But they don’t just apply to Israel. They apply to all parties … By this year’s end, we must have revived final-status negotiations and they must have explicitly as their aims an Israeli state free from terror, recognized by the Arab world, and a viable Palestinian state based on the boundaries of 1967.”
Blair stated his support for UN resolutions to be applied to the situation between Israel and the Palestinians as much as to Iraq. An aide to Blair said his appeal was an attempt to get the peace process moving again, but added the prime minister was not trying to lead a brokering process.
In a passionate speech in support of the U.S., Blair warned that unless the world dealt with the danger posed by Iraq, the authority of the UN would be ruined. He said that the UN must be ready to tackle Saddam Hussein if he fails to meet demands to scrap weapons of mass destruction.
“If at this moment, having found the collective will to recognize the danger, we lose our collective will to deal with it, then we will destroy not the authority of America or Britain but of the United Nations itself,” Blair said.
Meanwhile, sources in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s entourage on its way home from Moscow said that it’s possible Israel won’t have to be involved at all in the war in Iraq if it breaks out, because the U.S. “is taking all the possibilities into account.”
The sources hinted that in its first wave of attack, the U.S. would strike at Iraqi missile launchers to prevent Baghdad from firing at Israel, as it did in 1991, when Israel did not respond under heavy U.S. pressure to stay out of the way of the coalition forces.
Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer appeared to echo those remarks yesterday, telling the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that he does not expect Iraq to attack Israel. Iraq has the capability of launching surface-to-surface missiles, Ben-Eliezer said, but the missiles have a limited ability to carry chemical and biological materials. He said Iraq will only attack if it finds itself in a critical situation resulting from a U.S. operation.
Sharon meanwhile plans to convene Ben-Eliezer and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres today along with top-level military experts on Israel’s means for deterring existential-strategic threats. Two months ago, at a similar session, Sharon urged the officials to “work energetically” on a working plan for such deterrence, but did not add any money to their budgets.
In another development, government sources confirmed a newspaper report yesterday that said outgoing Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy was recently in Qatar to meet a senior Palestinian official on behalf of the prime minister. Abu Mazen, considered a leading contender to become prime minister of a Palestinian Authority cabinet, showed up in Moscow yesterday for a meeting with Russian officials and Halevy’s possible whereabouts created a stir. But sources in the PM’s entourage said that Halevy was leaving Moscow for a round of farewell meetings with European intelligence chiefs, before he becomes head of the National Security Council at the end of the month, and Meir Dagan replaces him.
On the Palestinian issue, Ben-Eliezer admitted that Israel’s freedom of action has been limited in the wake of the IDF siege on Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters. He said that several “cardinal” mistakes were made during the operation, including that nobody from intelligence or the political echelon “correctly predicted” the degree to which the U.S. would oppose the siege. Meretz MK Ran Cohen blamed Ben-Eliezer for the Muqata siege, saying that Israel hurt its relations with the United States, destroyed the reform process within the Palestinian Authority, and pulverized Israel’s deterrence in the eyes of the terrorists. Cohen demanded that Ben-Eliezer share with committee members the names of defense establishment officials who had warned against the Muqata siege and what had been the reasoning for the decision not to comply with their warnings.
Arafat met with key Fatah officials yesterday at his Muqata office, telling him that in the wake of the siege, he needs another two weeks to come up with a new cabinet, as demanded by the Palestinian Legislative Council last month. He indicated to them that “now is not the time” to discuss reforms.