2003-08-01-Shimon Peres

2003-08-01 Shimon Peres-Gaza

Israeli Cities

Interview with Israel's former prime minister

Peres urges quick
withdrawal from Gaza

San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, Aug. 1, 2003

By Donald H. Harrison

TEL AVIV— Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres has called for Israel to pull Jewish
settlements out of the Gaza Strip as early as possible and then enable Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to build a real government.

"We cannot keep the settlements in the heat of the strip," Peres told Heritage during a 20-minute interview July 21 in the downtown office suite he maintains as a former prime minister. "We need to be generous about this."

Asked if he were calling for the West Bank to be returned to Palestinians later, Peres bandied the question with the reply that he was calling for the Gaza Strip to be returned early.

Referring to Abbas by his popular name of Abu Mazen, Peres said the Palestinian prime minister was a better peace partner than Palestinian President Yassir Arafat, and added that Abbas is "the closest thing we have to what was once Sadat."

(In November of 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem to initiate negotiations with Israel, leading to the signing in March, 1979, of a peace treaty with Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Hosted by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the peace treaty signing ceremony formally initiated Israel's return to Egypt of the Sinai Desert captured in the 1967 Six Day
War and retained in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Islamic militants assassinated Sadat in 1981.)

Asked if he believed the current three-month ceasefire or hudna agreed to by the Palestinians would hold, Peres replied: "A permanent ceasefire would be better than a temporary one, but a temporary one is better than no ceasefire."

He said that the world, headed by the United States, is achieving a global consensus that terror is wrong, making it harder for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to go back to terror.

The former prime minister said that by successfully pursuing its war against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein¹s regime, the United States has shown to other countries in the Middle East that it is serious about fighting terror and that it is not "a paper tiger."

Peres addressed the criticism that the United States never found the weapons of mass destruction that President George W. Bush said were the cause for war. The Israeli leader said that even if the Iraqis successfully hid gas and chemical weapons, which previously had been used devastatingly against Iraq's own Kurdish population as well as against Iran, "nobody can deny they had the capacity to build them." The question was "not just where they store them but the production of them."

Peres did not address in his comment the issue of alleged nuclear weapons in Iraq.

Having the U.S. in Iraq is a major change for the Middle East, Peres said. "It is better to have the United States as a neighbor than Saddam Hussein. Palestinians begin to understand that under terrorism the risks are far greater."

Beyond that, he said, he foresees a time when there will be a region of peace in which Israelis and Palestinians could benefit from water flowing from Turkey through Iraq and Jordan.

Peres also said that he was familiar with the maquiladoras that line San Diego's border with Tijuana and said that they were a good model for Israelis and Palestinians to attract international investment. The maquiladoras or "twin plants" have labor-intensive products assembled in
Mexico, where labor costs are lower, then transported across the border, where high-tech components are incorporated into the final product. There is a similar disparity between wages paid in Israel and neighboring Arab jurisdictions.

Having recently been returned to the chairmanship of the opposition Labor party, Peres, 79, said he believes his party must become the vehicle of hope for the Israeli people. In particular, he said, it must emphasize the development of Israel¹s economy through science, technology and education.

"Instead of investing in war, we need to invest in infrastructure," he said. Israel needs "high tech, tranquility and stability" in the Negev and the Galilee if it is to realize its hopes to populate those areas.

In the meantime, Peres said, the nonprofit Peres Peace Center that he heads will focus on two projects. One, he said, will be the development of desalination and purification of water.

"We are entering a new age of nanotechnology by which the cost of recycling and desalination of water can be reduced by half," he predicted. "I would rather fight the desert than animosity."

San Diego State University President Stephen Weber was among the founding board members of the Peres Peace Center. Through the SDSU Foundation¹s Hansen Center for World Peace, the local university in conjunction with the Peres Peace Center developed projects in which Israel and its Arab neighbors jointly tackled increasing the productivity of desert lands. However, these
projects were postponed or cancelled after the second intifada began.

Helping 1,100 Palestinian children and "hundreds of Israeli children" to receive medical care for wounds or injuries they suffered since the second intifada began in September 2000 will be another priority of the Peres Peace Center, the former prime minister said. "We are collecting funds for this," he said.

Initiatives such as these will be helped tremendously by peace, he said, "but you don¹t postpone them for peace."