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Last Updated: Nov 2nd, 2009 - 17:32:57 |
ABU DIS, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad set a goal on Monday of establishing a Palestinian state within two years.
Fayyad, a technocrat with no significant political base of his own, heads a newly aligned cabinet with more ministers from the dominant Fatah faction of President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Islamist Hamas rivals refuse to recognize the premier.
"I call on all our people to unite around the project of establishing a state and to strengthen its institutions ... so that the Palestinian state becomes, by the end of next year or within two years at most, a reality," he said in a speech.
"Achieving this goal within two years is possible," he told an audience at Al Quds university near Jerusalem.
He said his priority was Palestinian unity between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but he made no direct appeal to Hamas, whose control of Gaza since 2007 has made it virtually a separate Palestinian territory.
In line with Abbas's policy, he signaled no change in the Palestinian refusal to resume peace talks with Israel until it freezes Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Palestinians, he said, should win world support by building up all the institutions for the independent state they seek:
"The need for it has become more pressing after the speech of the Israeli prime minister tried to bypass the international consensus that calls for Israel to implement its obligations."
Israeli officials declined comment on the speech.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said that Fayyad "has no right to speak about national unity."
Keen to prove their law-and-order credentials as part of efforts to revive peace talks with Israel, Abbas and Fayyad have been mounting increasingly bloody West Bank crackdowns on Hamas.
"He (Fayyad) creates the greatest danger for Palestinians by believing in the ongoing security coordination with the Zionist enemy," Barhoum said.
CLASH OF NARRATIVES
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech on June 14, said he was ready to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state, but only if it forgoes many attributes of sovereignty -- notably an army, full control of its own borders and air space, and the power to forge military pacts.
Netanyahu has refused to halt the expansion of settlements as required by a 2003 peace "road map," and added a new demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a "Jewish state."
Fayyad said there was still an opportunity to make a just peace, but not on the basis of the Jewish "narrative" of history advanced by Netanyahu.
"We, the Palestinians, have a totally different narrative," he said. "I do not expect you to accept the historic Palestinian narrative, you should not expect us to approve the historic Israeli narrative as a basis to solve the conflict."
Fayyad's remarks were billed as a reply to U.S. President Barack Obama and Netanyahu, who both chose university backdrops for major speeches on Middle East peace earlier this month.
Addressing "our Israeli neighbors," he said Palestinians "have one major aspiration: to live in freedom and dignity in a homeland of our own as a natural right like the rest of the people of the earth."
"We hope to embody our state next to your state through a meaningful peace that would establish the way for natural ties in all spheres ... We do not wish to build walls but bridges."
Palestinians expected foreign powers to shoulder their responsibilities by keeping Israel to its promises, Fayyad said.
To renew the people's battered confidence in the peace process, he said, Israel should stop settlement "in all its forms," stop the demolition of Palestinian homes, the confiscation of land and the isolation of Jerusalem.
Netanyahu insists all Jerusalem must be capital of Israel. Fayyad asserted the Palestinian counter-claim: "East Jerusalem will be our eternal capital for our independent state."
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