PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY prime minister Salam Fayyad has praised Ireland’s role in the promotion of a European consensus on the Middle East peace process.
In Brussels for talks with European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, Mr Fayyad said an EU foreign ministers’ communiqué last December on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians was significant.
While calling for a swift resumption of peace talks, the communiqué also said a way must be found for Jerusalem to become the future capital of both a Palestinian state and Israel.
“Ireland plays an important role in that European consensus that was forged in December last year,” Mr Fayyad told reporters.
“I’m referring here to [the] EU Council statement of December 8th last year, which we believe most substantive, and definitely provides a strong basis for enabling the EU to play a very effective and constructive role in moving the process forward.”
As indirect “proximity” talks chaired by US envoy George Mitchell continue without any imminent sign of a breakthrough, Mr Fayyad said the Palestinian Authority would be ready in the next year for the formal establishment of a Palestinian state.
“Within a year . . . we should actually be ready, having completed the task of capacity-building and institution-building and providing the adequate infrastructure of state,” he said.
Mr Barroso said Palestinian statehood was “critical for any peaceful, workable and lasting resolution” to the conflict, and called for further efforts to ease Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
“Despite encouraging statements by the government of Israel . . . the situation in Gaza remains so far fundamentally unchanged,” he said.
“Improving the economic situation in the Gaza Strip is not simply a matter of letting in aid, it is a matter of revitalising the local economy. That requires the opening of additional border crossings, so the infrastructure, hospitals and schools can be rebuilt . . .”
Mr Barroso called for confidence-building measures to be implemented by Israel, actions Mr Fayyad described as necessary “for there to begin to develop a sense of a Palestinian state in the making”.
