Israel to free 250 Palestinian prisoners

Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he will free 250 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, as a gesture to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. He was speaking after a four-way summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, which included King Adbullah of Jordan and was hosted by Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak. They had gone to the Red Sea coast to hear how Israel might support the moderate Fatah movement of President Abbas.

Olmert said the prisoner release is a display of goodwill to Abbas, adding that those to be released are Fatah members with "no blood on their hands", and a commitment not to involve themselves again in terror. Earlier, Abbas had heard news from Israel that hundreds of millions of euros in Palestinian taxes would be released to his government, once Israel was sure that none of the money would reach the Islamists of Hamas.

Before the meeting, Olmert stressed the need for the arab world to see the four leaders expressing a genuine desire to build a peace process.

Olmert's summit gesture to Abbas was more insult than overture!

On the same subjet, The Lebaon Daily News reports:
Israeli officials worked hard to play down expectations ahead of Monday's four-way summit at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert worked just as hard to meet them by sharply limiting what were unconvincingly advertised as his efforts to bolster Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. With Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah II on hand to lend credibility as Arab "moderates," the best Olmert had to offer was a commitment to put a proposal before his Cabinet to free 250 members of Abbas' Fatah faction held in Israeli jails.

Given the fact that approximately 10,000 Palestinians - including hundreds of women and children - are currently languishing in Israeli custody, many of them without charge, no one should be fooled into thinking that Olmert is serious about peace.

It is true that Olmert's domestic political position is a weak one, but that is because of past failures to understand the direct causal relationship between his country's continued occupation of Arab land and his people's inability to live in peace and security. He will not, therefore, improve his dismal performance in opinion surveys by subjecting Palestinians (and other Arabs) to the insulting spectacle of tangential "concessions" that would be hollow even if he made good on them. On the contrary, by refusing to accept the evidence of the past 40 years that the Arabs will not be beaten into submission, he can only guarantee further conflict.

As Abdullah has repeatedly warned, the time to make a full and fair peace is not limitless. The longer Israel substitutes brute force for diplomacy, disguises insult as overture, and treats would-be interlocutors like lesser beings entitled to fewer rights, the more it weakens those Palestinians and other Arabs who believe in a negotiated solution. By refusing to abide by international law and plain common sense, the Jewish state has consistently reduced the number of those willing to risk their credibility by working with it diplomatically.

Now Olmert has only made matters worse, and at precisely the wrong moment. Abbas needed desperately to show that his strategy of engagement has a better chance of achieving Palestinian statehood than the confrontation recommended by his rivals from Hamas. He needed to come home with a trophy for his championing of a two-state solution arrived at by mutual agreement, some kind of evidence that Israel's leaders finally see the errors of their ways. Instead, Abbas returned with a flimsy Israeli undertaking to pursue an almost meaningless gesture. As a result, the Palestinian people received only confirmation that Olmert views their flexibility as weakness, their patience as gullibility, and their suffering as irrelevant. How much longer can this continue before they, in turn, conclude that negotiation with the Jewish state is a fool's errand that can only end in additional frustration and heartache?

By The Daily Star, Lebanon