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Envoy: Israel wants relations with AU political lobby revived
2008-03-19 09:26:10
By Guardian Reporter
Israel has said it would like its relations with African countries rejuvenated and the country invited to African Union`s annual summit of heads of state and government.
Speaking during an interview with The Guardian in Dar es Salaam yesterday, Israel ambassador to Tanzania Jacob Keidar said his country had something special it would like to share with African Union members.
He said Africa and Israel had had good relations in the past and that his country once used to be invited to the continent`s highest political fora.
On current Tanzania-Israel relations, he said they were encouraging, adding that his country was looking forward to investing more in Tanzania in the areas of agriculture, telecommunications, water and health.
He said there was a substantial number of Israeli investors in the northern part of the country engaged in farming and other activities.
Speaking on the situation in the Middle East, he said the failure to reach a peace agreement by the conflicting parties had delayed a grand programme aimed at turning the disputed Gaza Strip into a Singapore of the Middle East.
He said peace negotiations had at the moment collapsed, rendering it difficult for things to move forward.
Negotiations for peace leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state had always experienced interventions, he observed.
Giving an example, he said after the Camp David talks brokered by then US president Jimmy Carter in 1979, late Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat did not agree with Israel on a number of things, thus embarked on fighting (al Intifada), while the latter pulled both settlers and armies from Gaza as a prelude to the initiation of the peace process.
He said many world governments were then ready to pour in money in order to turn Gaza into a prosperous world city like modern Singapore, but the peace process had delayed that gigantic programme.
He would not mention the countries that were ready to pour in money for the transformation process, but said Israel businesspeople would have been the first to turn Gaza into another Singapore.
Keidar, who is based in Kenya and also represents his country in Uganda and Somalia, said while Al Fatah (the moderate part of the PLO) accepted the offer, the militant islamists led by Hamas took the concession for peace not as an offer but as a weakness on the part of Israel.
``They thus resorted to the use of force and instead of having Gaza turned into another Singapore, it has turned into another Afghanistan or Somalia,`` he said, adding that most of the population in the area was experiencing miserable life as brother fights brother or sister.
He said the fighting eventually initiated incursions into Israel in a move to turn the whole area into an Islamic Republic of Palestine, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Ambassador Keidar said Israel`s vision was to have Palestine recognise the country, agreements reached in the peace process honoured and Palestinians live in their state side by side with Israelis as brethren.
When asked to comment on Israeli army attacks on the Palestinian civilian population who have nothing to defend themselves with save for stones, he said militants were using subtle tactics including positioning children as pawns or ploys during assaults.
He said Israel had now won the stand of moderate Arab countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Gulf states, Jordan and north African countries, who together with Palestininian leader Mahmoud Abbas and the Al Fatah splinter group want to see the peace process revived.
Asked what US President Bush\'s recent visit in the Middle East achieved, he said he managed to relaunch the peace process, adding that the last time such a situation happened was in 1991.
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