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Politics : Middle East Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (407)	1/11/2002 4:37:21 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6945

These are the guys I tend to listen too... Palestinian and Israeli activists call for peace talks Palestinian officials and moderate Israeli politicians have issued a joint declaration calling for a return to peace talks without preconditions. The Israeli government has insisted a truce and the possibility of talks could only be followed by a week of complete calm. But a delegation of Israelis and Palestinians who met for three days in Cape Town, South Africa, disagree. They said the only way to salvage hopes for peace after over 15 months of violence was to begin talking immediately. However, the statement holds little bearing because no members of the Israel's hard-line government attended the meeting. Instead, Israel was represented by members of Israel's dovish vanguard, led by Yossi Beilin, the former justice minister, and Avraham Burg, speaker of the Knesset, or Israeli parliament. The Palestinian delegation was led by chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and Cabinet minister Ziad Abu Ziad. Preconditions for talks have "only served to escalate violence and raise suspicion that such conditions are designed to avoid negotiations," said South African Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad, reading a statement that also was signed by the South Africans. The declaration also called for an immediate freeze on the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The South African government said it hoped to contribute to Middle East peace efforts from its own experience negotiating a peaceful end to apartheid. Beilin, an architect of the 1993 breakthrough Middle east peace accords said extremists should not be allowed to diminish hopes for a breakthrough. "We, the veterans of the peace process, we know how problematic these preconditions (are)," Beilin said. "They give power to the lunatics of this world because they know that if there are preconditions, there will be no talks." ananova.com