news Olmert says was ready to sign Palestinian peace deal

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Olmert says was ready to sign Palestinian peace deal


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JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israel's outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Sunday that his government had been ready to sign a peace deal with the Palestinians but that they had lacked the courage to do so.

"The peace negotiations with the Palestinians had made a big step forward and were more interesting and deeper than any talks held in the past by any government, including (then premier, now outgoing Defence Minister) Ehud Barak at Camp David (in the United States in 2000)," Olmert said.
"The fact that we haven't reached one (a peace agreement) so far is due to the weakness and lack of courage on the part of the Palestinian leaders," he told the weekly cabinet meeting, likely to be one of his last.
"We were ready to sign a peace deal but the Palestinians unfortunately did not have the courage to do so," he said.
A spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas slammed the remarks.
"What Olmert says is entirely false," Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP.
"The proposals (during the talks) did not include conditions for the creation of an independent Palestinian state on all Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 with east Jerusalem as its capital."
"Israel did not present a single map and not a single serious position that could lead to a real peace on the base of two states," he said.
In November, Abbas charged that he had been unable to reach agreement with Israel on a single issue in 12 months of negotiations.
Olmert hailed the work done by outgoing Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who has led the Israeli side in the talks since their relaunch at a conference in the United States in November 2007 but who looks set to go into opposition as right-wing opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu forms a new government after last month's general election.
"Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni headed the negotiating team and did a great amount of work that was detailed and complex and that has never been done before," he said.
"I have no doubt that any future government will not be able to hold negotiations without the groundwork laid by Tzipi Livni."
Olmert reiterated that Israel "will have to make dramatic and painful concessions to reach a peace agreement."
The outgoing premier has repeatedly irked Israeli nationalists by insisting that the Jewish state needs to share Jerusalem in any final peace deal with the Palestinians.
The revival of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in 2007 came after the Islamist Hamas movement ousted forces loyal to Abbas from Gaza in June of that year, effectively confining his writ to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.