Olmert welcomes Arab peace initiative

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has hailed a peace drive by Arab states as marking a “revolutionary change”.

But he flatly rejected its demand to let Palestinian refugees return to Israel’s borders, newspapers reported today.

While the US and moderate Arab countries are pushing to re-energise long-stalled peace efforts, Mr Olmert seemed disinclined to immediately tackle the thorniest issues dividing Israel and the Palestinians, such as final borders, the status of disputed Jerusalem and the refugee question.

He spoke of the possibility of a comprehensive peace in the region “within five years” and said there would be no shortcut to a final deal.

He made the comments in interviews with Israeli media ahead of the Passover holiday, which begins next week.

Mr Olmert told the Haaretz daily that the 2002 peace plan revived at the Arab League summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this week showed that many Arab states realised they “may have been wrong to think that Israel is the world’s greatest problem”. This represented a “revolutionary change in outlook,” he said.

The Arab plan, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, calls for full recognition of Israel by the Arab world in return for an Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in the 1967 Mideast war and a “just solution” for Palestinian refugees who fled or were driven from homes inside Israel during the war following Israel’s creation in 1948.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is to conduct negotiations with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians, welcomed the proposal. But Hamas, the Islamist group that governs alongside Abbas’ Fatah movement, ruled out any possibility of recognising Israel or compromising on a full refugee return.

Israel rejects a full withdrawal, hoping to hang on to several settlement blocs in the West Bank. It has also ruled out any refugee return, because an influx of refugees and their millions of descendants would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

In another interview published in the English-language Jerusalem Post, Mr Olmert reiterated this opposition, calling a refugee return “out of the question”.

“I’ll never accept a solution that is based on their return to Israel, any number,” Olmert said.