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Newsletter : 9fax1117.txt
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>Israel Faxx
>JN Nov. 17, 1999, Vol. 7, No. 214
IDF Commander: Palestinian State Within Two Years
By IsraelWire
According to Israel Radio quoting a senior IDF officer, the PLO Authority will declare statehood within two years, primarily when Chairman Arafat realizes the ongoing Oslo process is blocking that objective. The unnamed senior commander stated that Arafat does prefer the diplomatic channels but when he realizes he is up against a wall, the PA will intentionally provoke a crisis situation that would lead to a unilateral declaration of statehood.
Ross Meets with Israeli/Palestinian Negotiators
By Meredith Buel (VOA-Jerusalem)
Middle East envoy Dennis Ross has talked with top Israeli and Palestinian officials as both sides try to resolve a dispute threatening implementation of an interim peace accord, but no immediate progress was reported after the talks.
Ross met with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators after the two sides missed Monday's deadline for the transfer of West-Bank land required under the revised Wye-River peace accord. Under the accord, signed last September in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheik, Israel is required to hand over land in the occupied territories to the Palestinians.
Monday was the deadline for Israel to transfer another 2 percent of West-Bank land to full Palestinian control and 3 percent to Palestinian civil administration. The handover requires the redeployment of Israeli soldiers from the area.
Both sides are locked in a dispute over which land will be transferred. Palestinians are demanding control over parts of the West Bank that are more densely populated than the areas Israel is proposing to hand over.
Israeli officials insist the transfer does not require Palestinian approval, but the Palestinians are rejecting a unilateral pullout.
Speaking before a meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy, Ross said the additional redeployment of Israeli soldiers from the occupied territories is a responsibility Israel has to carry out.
Israel and the Palestinians have set February as the deadline for reaching a framework agreement for a permanent peace accord and next September as the deadline for signing a final peace treaty.
Negotiations are continuing on such difficult issues as the fate of Palestinian refugees, the borders of a possible Palestinian State, Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, water rights, and the future of Jerusalem.
Nazi Slave Labor Negotiations Continue
By Jonathan Braude (VOA-Berlin)
The German government has increased its proposed compensation for victims of Nazi slave labor programs -- stepping up the pressure on industry to also increase its offer. But German industry is resisting.
The German government complained for weeks about the amount of money the nation's industries are prepared to contribute to a fund for compensating the victims of Nazi slave labor programs.
As a new round of compensation talks started Tuesday, the government announced it will increase its contribution by about $550 million -- raising the whole government-industry compensation offer to just under $4 billion.
But if the government's move was intended to push companies into increasing their offer, the reaction so far has been negative. A spokesman for the industry negotiators, Wolfgang Gibowski, merely urged the government to increase its contribution even further.
The German government is not satisfied with the $2.2 billion dollars offered by the industry side. Neither are negotiators for the Israeli and eastern-European governments taking part in the talks nor the lawyers for the tens-of-thousands of victims of Nazi slave-labor policies. The lawyers described the offer as an insult after the last round of talks in Washington in October.
But with only 17 companies openly prepared to contribute -- and roughly the same number said to be waiting to see what an agreement will cost them -- there is no sign German firms are ready to increase the offer.
That could change during two days of intensive negotiations that began Tuesday in Bonn. But the talks could just as easily break up in angry recriminations as they did last month.
Participants expect the meetings to be tough and often bad-tempered. One German official said it was going to be one big "horse-trading" session. Meanwhile, researchers at a German university estimate that the real amount of money owed to victims may be closer to $100 billion. That sum -- according to research by Germany's Bremen University -- is roughly the profit, in today's prices, that German industry, state-owned and private, would have made out of using forced labor during World War II.
The victims' lawyers, who up to now have been hinting at a sum nearer $10 billion, have suggested the new research might be the basis for later claims if the current negotiations break down. The talk of $100 billion claims has upset the German government. One angry government official said that level of payment would cause bitter resentment among Germans across the country and really encourage the extreme right.
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