Palestinians must show peace move, says Sharon

ISRAELI Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday that it was now the turn of the Palestinians to prove they want peace following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

In a speech to the UN General Assembly, Mr Sharon said the Palestinians were entitled to a state of their own and that Israel was reaching out for reconciliation with them and its Arab neighbours.

He also urged the Palestinians to “eliminate terror” and the “culture of hatred” in relations with the Jewish state. “It is now the Palestinians’ turn to prove their desire for peace,” he said, following Israel’s first removal of settlements from occupied land which Palestinians want for a state.

“The Palestinians will always be our neighbours. We respect them and do not desire to rule over them. They also deserve freedom and a sovereign national entity,” he said. Mr Sharon reiterated his longstanding call for the Palestinian Authority to disarm militant groups as stipulated in a US-backed peace road map for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who declared a ceasefire along with Mr Sharon in February, has avoided confronting the powerful militants, citing the risk of civil war. Instead, he wants to co-opt them into security services.

But they have refused to disarm and threatened to discard the truce in the face of Israel’s expansion of much larger settlements in the West Bank.

Palestinians welcomed the Gaza withdrawal but say occupation will not have ended as long as Israel keeps controlling Gaza’s land borders, air space and territorial waters and also holds onto much of the West Bank as well as Arab East Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Supreme Court defiantly upheld the legality of Israel’s West Bank security barrier but has ordered the government to look at rerouting it where it causes suffering to Palestinians. Rejecting a ruling by the International Court of Justice that the barrier violates Palestinian rights and should be torn down, the nine-member panel of judges said the July 2004 judgment by the world court in The Hague, The Netherlands, did not sufficiently consider Israel’s security needs.

During the hearing, Israel presented a written deposition disputing the court’s jurisdiction, but did not argue its case in court.

The Israeli decision, its first on the issue since the Hague ruling, said, however, that the barrier should be rerouted in sections where it causes undue suffering to Palestinians. The court directed the Defence Ministry to reroute a section of the barrier that would isolate Palestinian residents of five villages near the settlement of Alfei Menashe, home to about 5,000 Israelis.

Israel says the 425-mile barrier it is building around the West Bank is meant to prevent Palestinian attacks, but Palestinians say the complex of walls, fences, trenches and razor wire is a land grab which cuts thousands off from their farmland, schools, jobs and medical facilities.

Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said if Israel wanted to build a barrier, it should do so on its own territory and not on Arab land it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.