(Abstract from the Assembly Verbatim report – 25.04.2002)

Statement by Haim Ramon, member of the Knesset

Mr Haim RAMON (Representative of the Speaker of the Israeli Knesset). – I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you this morning. As you have described, I have come from Israel, which is in the middle of the worst conflict in the world today.

I will briefly introduce myself. In Israel, I belong to the group that has for many years fought for a fair compromise between Israel and the Palestinians. Mr Abu Zayyad will be able to confirm that. I supported the idea of a Palestinian state when it was very unpopular in Israel twenty years ago. I was a member of the Rabin government during negotiations on the Oslo Accord and I was personally involved with that accord. I was a member of the Barak government, which made a generous proposal during the Camp David convention.

What is happening in the Middle East? We are dealing with details – horrible details. From outside, those details are terrifying. The details are that youngsters who are going to discos are being murdered. Families celebrating one of the most important days in Israeli history – Passover, when we became a free nation and went from slavery to freedom – are being slaughtered. Whole families are being wiped out. They go for a coffee or to a restaurant and are murdered. Those are the details.

I know that the Palestinians can present us with their own tragedy. Why have we found ourselves in this impossible situation? Why is it the situation? I am trying to explain why and to go back to basics. What is the basic problem that we face in the Middle East? Almost ten years ago, we reached an agreement in Oslo. What was that agreement? It was an agreement between us and the Palestinians that we would give them land – for the first time in their history, they would get land. They became responsible for their own land and they promised that they would solve all disputes between us and them only through negotiation – not through force, violation, violence or terrorism but only through negotiation. That was the deal. We, the state of Israel – I was a member of the government – provided the Palestinian police with weapons so that they could deal with their own terrorists. That was the idea. Never in history had such a thing happened before. We trusted them.

The Rabin government was greatly criticised at the time by the Israeli public, who asked why we were doing that. Then, Rabin said, “If, God forbid, the Palestinians use these weapons against us, we will re-occupy the territories.” The world agreed when we signed the Oslo Accord.

What has happened? Almost two years ago, in July 2000, we went to Camp David. Barak was the Prime Minister. He offered the Palestinians the most generous proposal that has been made by any Israeli Government: almost 100% of the land – it was 90% or 95%. He offered to divide Jerusalem and to demolish the majority of the settlements. The Palestinian answer was no. I fail to understand why, but it was their right to reject a political offer.

Two months later, after rejecting the most generous proposals, which would have given them a state and would have fulfilled 95% of their political dreams, they started the intifada and Yasser Arafat himself violated the fundamental basis of the Oslo Accord – not to use violence, but to solve all disputes through negotiation.

In the first days of the intifada, Yasser Arafat released all the terrorists belonging to Hamas and the Jihad from jails in Gaza and the West Bank. A few months later, the worst wave of terrorism ever started, with suicide bombs aimed at the civilian population of the state of Israel. Unfortunately, that is what happened.

We have been demanding a cease-fire all the time, but the wave of terrorism did not come only from extreme fundamental Islamic organisations – Hamas and Jihad – it came from Fatah itself, from Arafat himself. He was involved in terrorism and he used it as a political instrument against the state of Israel.

That is the main problem: a head of state who has been defined as a historic leader of the Palestinian people, which he is, is using terrorism against the state of Israel and against civilians. It is his own people. It is not those who are against him – not Hamas or Jihad. It is his own people – members of the Palestinian political leadership. That is the main problem. The leader of the Palestinian Authority is engaged in terrorism as a political tool to achieve political aims.

My government is making mistakes and I can criticise those mistakes. However, I believe that the problem that I have described is the basic problem. The Palestinian Authority and its leader will not understand that if the use of terrorism as a political instrument does not come to an end, it will be impossible to achieve any sort of settlement between us and the Palestinians. The minute he understands that and he seriously starts to fight against terrorism – to abandon terrorism as a political instrument – we will have a chance to bring peace to the Middle East. That is the basic problem that we are facing.

I believe that the majority of people in Israel are ready to recognise a Palestinian state and to make painful concessions. I believe that, even now after the intifada, we are ready to go back more or less to what was proposed a year and a half ago. It is unfortunate that such an approach was rejected, that the Palestinians preferred the way of violence and of terrorism. Palestinians themselves – and not just the Israelis – are paying the heaviest price.

I have known Mr Ziad Abu Zayyad for many years and he is my friend. All Palestinians are friends, and I call on Yasser Arafat to stop terrorism and violence and to return to the Oslo process. That is the only way to reach a reasonable and fair solution to the conflict between us and the Palestinians.