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Newsletter : 2fax0610.txt
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Cyanide Was on Agenda of Park Hotel Attack
By IsraelNationalNews.com
Intelligence community officials reported last week that terrorists planned using cyanide in the Passover terror attack in the Park Hotel in Netanya that claimed 29 lives. The poison was not deployed due to a technical foul up according to a report delivered to the Knesset Foreign Affairs & Defense Committee by Chief of Army Intelligence Major-General Aaron Ze'evi Farkash.
Sharon in Washington For Meetings With Bush
By VOA News
President Bush meets Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who said violence must stop before serious negotiations with the Palestinians can begin. Sharon spelled out his views in the New York Times Sunday on the eve of his White House talks. He said "Israel must defeat terrorism" before the peace process can move forward.
Sharon also said that Israel would not return to its 1967 borders or give up any part of Jerusalem as called for in an Arab land-for-peace proposal. But he said there is a need for peace with the Arab world, and proposed a regional peace conference with what he described as "like-minded Middle Eastern states."
Sharon's visit comes on the heels of two days of talks between Bush and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the presidential retreat at Camp David, outside Washington. After the meetings, which ended Saturday, Bush said he was not ready to set a timetable for establishing a Palestinian state, but that steps towards that goal should start immediately.
"We are not ready to lay down a specific calendar, except for the fact that we need to get started quickly, soon so that we can seize the moment," Bush said.
Bush said Arafat is not the issue. He said there is plenty of talent in the Palestinian Authority to lead an independent state with or without Arafat, who the president says must do more to end suicide bombings.
"Chairman Arafat must do everything in his power to stop the violence, to stop the attacks on Israel. I mean everything. And that includes reforming the security forces so that their primary function is to deal with violence," he said.
In an interview with "Fox News" Sunday, Mubarak called Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza a time bomb and again urged Israel to withdraw from occupied territory. He said the U.S. remains the key to Middle East peace, adding that without pressure from a heavyweight power, the Palestinians and Israelis will get nowhere.
Arafat Downsizes Palestinian Cabinet
By VOA News
Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat has formed a smaller cabinet and named an interior minister following international calls to reform the Palestinian Authority. Arafat appointed Abdel Razak Yehiyeh as interior minister to reform the Palestinian Authority's police and intelligence services. Israel says those forces have not done enough to reign in terrorists. Arafat also named former International Monetary Fund official Salam Fayyad as finance minister.
The cabinet changes come one month after the Palestinian parliament called for sweeping changes of the Palestinian Authority. Israel and the United States have stressed the need, in particular, for reforms to Palestinian security services to end terrorist violence.
Meanwhile, Palestinian police arrested a senior leader of Islamic Jihad, the group that claimed responsibility for a suicide attack last week that killed 17 Israelis. Officials say Abdullah Shami was arrested in Gaza City.
In the West Bank, a Palestinian gunman attacked an Israeli military camp south of Nablus, wounding four Israeli soldiers. One Palestinian was killed in the attack, claimed by the Palestinian militant group, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Political Scientist Recalls Recent Interview with Arafat
By IsraeliWire.com
Deborah Gerner, University of Kansas (Lawrence) professor of political science and a specialist on conflict resolution in the Middle East, was one of a dozen European, Arab and American scholars and journalists who met with Yasir Arafat May 18 in his residence in Ramallah. The meeting was held in the compound room where Arafat lived for the 38 days he was under siege.
Gerner, who had interviewed Arafat in the 1980s, noted that although the Palestinian leader expressed dismay and bewilderment about the U.S. position on Palestine, he repeatedly said that it was essential the United States remain engaged and involved in the peace process.
She left her most recent meeting with Arafat struck with "how very weakened he seemed to be physically from the period when he was under siege. For the first time he seemed to me to be genuinely old."
Gerner, who lived in Ramallah in 1996 and has made about 20 trips to the Middle East since the mid-1980s, said she sensed widespread despair about whether peace is possible in the region. "For both Israelis and Palestinians, the sense of trust and optimism that existed after the Oslo (accords) has completely dissolved, I think," Gerner said. "And the last two years of uprising have merely exacerbated that lack of trust."
She noted, "One issue of particular concern to the international community and to nongovernmental organizations working in the region is a new policy "to divide the West Bank into eight separate distinct areas. Palestinians will now be forbidden to travel between these areas except with a special permit." Even with the permits, Gerner said, authorities may deny permission to pass through a checkpoint.
"The implication of this for people's ability to move freely is huge," Gerner said. Putting the situation in a local context, she explained, "It would mean that someone who got sick in Baldwin City, Kansas (15 miles southeast of Lawrence), an area which does not have a hospital, would have to be put into a car, driven to a checkpoint, placed on a stretcher, walked half a mile over a gravel area and then put into another ambulance at the other side to be brought to Lawrence Memorial Hospital."
