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JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.

He also dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel would or should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.

In an unusually frank and soul-searching interview granted after he resigned to fight corruption charges — he remains interim prime minister until a new government is sworn in — Mr. Olmert discarded longstanding Israeli defense doctrine and called for radical new thinking, in words that are sure to stir controversy as his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, tries to build a coalition.

“What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” Mr. Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot in the interview on the occasion of the Jewish new year, observed from Monday evening till Wednesday evening. “The time has come to say these things.”

He said that traditional Israeli defense strategists had learned nothing from past experiences and that they seemed stuck in the considerations of the 1948 war of independence.

“With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop,” he said. “All these things are worthless.”


As they reacted to Mr. Olmert’s remarks, Palestinian negotiators said it was satisfying to hear Mr. Olmert’s words but they said the words did not match what he had offered them so far. Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior Palestinian official, told Palestinian Radio that it would have been better if Mr. Olmert had taken this position while in office rather than while leaving it and that Mr. Olmert had not yet presented a detailed plan for a border between Israel and a Palestinian state.


Olmert- “Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel’s basic security?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/wo...olmert.html?em

Gradually, all but the right wing nutters are realising the only way to achieve long term security for Israel is to give the Palestinians back their occupied land. Even Ariel Sharon realised this, and kudos to Olmert for speaking out frankly on this festering issue- he was also previously staunchly against returning the occupied territories.

There is no other realistic option for Israel, plain and simple. Now, lets see some action.

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To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.

Butterfly

funny though that he never did anything to push the peace process or initiate more withdrawal ? maybe scared of his own security staff who could do him like Rabin, or worse finish like Sharon ?

I don't think Israeli PM have any power, it's obvious they can't do anything without the authorization of their military generals,

who said that Israel was a democracy again ? like it's Arab neighbors, they are no more than a little dictatorship in disguise