Mideast - AFP
Palestinian FM slams 'extremist' Israelis after talks in Dublin
Date: Thu, May 06, 2004
DUBLIN (AFP) - An EU-led push to solve the stalemate over peace in the Middle East ended in apparent acrimony, with the Palestinian foreign minister slamming Israel's "extremist" attitude during talks in Dublin.
"They were extremist to the maximum," Nabil Shaath told reporters the day after he and Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom joined a working dinner in the Irish capital which began the two-day Euro-Mediterranean meeting.
Adding to tensions at the gathering, which was dominated by the peace issue, Shalom later lambasted the EU's efforts towards the Middle East, labelling the bloc as "partial" towards the Palestinian side, an EU official said.
The atmosphere in a meeting between Shalom and an EU troika on Thursday morning was "unpleasant", the official told AFP.
The troika comprised EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten and Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen, whose country holds the bloc's rotating presidency.
Attempts to breathe new life into peace efforts at the regular gathering, which groups EU members with nine mainly Middle Eastern or North African nations and the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites), appeared doomed from the start.
According to the EU official, the Israeli and Palestinian sides swapped distinctly trenchant views during the opening dinner, exchanges he termed "verbal ping pong".
Shaath said later that the Palestinian side had pressed Israel to heed a call by the diplomatic Quartet of Middle East peace sponsors, who met in New York on Tuesday, to revive the region's international roadmap peace deal.
The Quartet -- the United Nations (news - web sites), United States, Russia and European Union (news - web sites) -- broadly endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites)'s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip (news - web sites) but also reassured the Palestinians that any final settlement would be negotiated.
This had been put to Shalom, Shaath said.
"But he rejected everything, using typical Israeli slanders," the Palestinian minister said.
"It was not a positive show," Shaath said of Wednesday's dinner.
"But we still have to keep trying."
The dinner was followed by separate meetings of the EU troika with Israel and Arab states on Thursday morning, and then a formal session of talks between all members, mainly concerned with other matters such as cultural links.
EU leaders tried to play down the tensions, with Cowen saying the exchanges between the Israeli and Palestinian ministers had been no more than "the usual frank exchange of views".
While refusing to be drawn on Shalom's criticisms of the bloc, Cowen insisted that the EU was neutral.
"The EU positions today are totally consistent with the Quartet positions that we agreed on. The UN are saying the same thing, the US is saying the same thing, the Russian Federation is saying the same thing," he told an end-of-meeting press conference.
The only possible solution would begin with a ceasefire, Cowen added, refusing to be downcast.
"We need to work for a ceasefire and I believe that there are prospects for a ceasefire if the political will can be demonstrated on both sides to achieve it."
The fate of Sharon's plan for partial disengagement remained unclear Thursday following its rejection by his Likud party at the start of the week.
Sharon's deputy, Ehud Olmert, said in a newspaper interview published Thursday that the scheme would be submitted unchanged to Israel's cabinet "within weeks".
SOURCE
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