MIDDLE EAST: Prime Minister Mr Ahmed Korei became the first high-ranking Palestinian official to suggest his people may adopt a one-state strategy, when he warned yesterday that Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon's plan to impose unilaterally a boundary deep in the West Bank would signal the death knell of the two-state solution, writes Peter Hirschberg in Jerusalem
If Mr Sharon carried out his plan for unilateral disengagement, completing a huge security barrier in the West Bank, absorbing large chunks of the occupied territories into Israel and leaving the Palestinians with little land on which to establish a state, then Mr Korei said the only option would be to "go for a one-state solution" in which Palestinians would demand equal rights with Israelis.
Mr Sharon has threatened unilateral measures if peace talks with the Palestinians do not resume. But Mr Korei, who made his comments in an interview with Reuters in his office in the town of Abu Dis near Jerusalem, said the Israeli leader's plan amounted to "an apartheid solution to put the Palestinians in cantons." "The wall," he said, referring to the West Bank barrier, "is to unilaterally mark the borders, this is the intention behind the wall ... It will kill the road map and kill the two-state vision."
Many Jewish Israelis are becoming concerned that if they do not separate from the Palestinians, then within a decade they will become a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, ruling over a Palestinian majority.
The Israeli left has long warned of this South Africa-type scenario, in which Palestinians begin to demand one-person-one-vote in a single state, rather than national self-determination in their own, separate state.
Mr Sharon, meanwhile, is coming under growing domestic pressure to respond to diplomatic overtures by Syrian President Hafez Assad, who has said he is ready to resume negotiations with Israel without any preconditions. So far, Mr Sharon has responded coolly, believing the Syrian leader's comments are aimed at Washington.