Israel will have to
withdraw from the territories it occupies, including East Jerusalem, if it
wants peace with its Arab and Palestinian neighbours, outgoing Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Monday, dpa
reported.
"We need to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, whose significance
is a withdrawal from almost all the (occupied) territories, if not from all the
territories, " he told the Yediot Ahronot daily in an interview to mark
the Jewish new year, which begins Monday night, and to mark his own impending
departure from office.
"We will retain a percentage of these territories," he added,
"but we will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage (of our
territory) because without this there will be no peace," he added.
He said the Israeli withdrawal would have to include East Jerusalem, possibly
the most sensitive issue in the ongoing Israeli- Palestinian peace talks.
The premier said however that any Israeli withdrawal would have to include
"special solutions ... regrading the Temple Mount/Haram al- Sharif
(compound) and the historic holy places."
"Whoever wants to hold on to the entire area of the city will have to
include 270,000 Arabs into Israeli sovereignty. It won't work. We have to
decide," he said, adding that the decision would be "difficult"
and that it would go against "our natural instincts."
Palestinians are demanding that Israel withdraw from all the territory it
captures from Jordan and Egypt in the 1967 Middle East War, to allow for the
establishment of a Palestinian state.
Although Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it controls the salient's
borders, airspace and sea lanes.
In addition, Israel has always said that East Jerusalem, which contains sites
holy to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and which it also captured in the 1967
war, is part of an undivided Jerusalem, which it calls its "eternal"
capital.
Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
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