Former Israel defence chiefs tout new peace plan

A group of prominent Israelis, many of them former defence chiefs, launched a new peace plan yesterday calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
The plan, an outline of which was seen by AFP, calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with mutually-agreed land swaps, and the division of Jerusalem to become the capital of two states.
It is based on a 2002 initiative launched by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah and endorsed by the Arab League which offers pan-Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for exactly such an arrangement.
Israel at the time described the Arab proposal as "positive" while containing "some problematic aspects" but it never made a formal public response.
Nine years later, former Shin Bet security agency chief Yaakov Peri told journalists, a reply was long overdue.
"Israel cannot continue to avoid answering that it is ready to go and discuss a comprehensive peace," he told a press conference launching the new proposal, called the Israel Peace Inititative.
In remarks broadcast by state radio he conceded that there was no instant solution.
"None of us is deceiving himself that we are headed for a treaty and tomorrow morning we shall get up and peace will break out," he said. "But we think that all the peoples of this region want peace, want a treaty, want security and want economic growth."
The initiative, like other past private proposals, proposes a solution to the thorny issue of refugees, suggesting that they be finacially compensated and allowed to return to the Palestinian state, with a "symbolic" number even allowed to return to Israel.
It also calls for Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which it occupied from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war in which it also seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.
The proposal was signed by more than 50 prominent Israelis, many of them former leading figures in the defence establishment such as Peri, former armed forces chief of staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon and ex-Mossad head Danny Yatom.
Moshe Shahal, a former Labour party cabinet minister, said Israel's position on the world stage was steadily eroding due to its policies toward the Palestinians.
"Time is running out, our status in the world is worsening," he said. "We are seen not only as rejecting peace but as those who are determined not to make an agreement."
Other intitiators of the initiative are academics and business leaders, such as Idan Ofer, a clean-energy entrepreneur and director of Israel's largest holding company.
"The occupation must end and the moment it ends the entire Arab world will stand open before us, to the Israeli economy, ready to do business," he told the Tel Aviv press conference.
"The bottom line of this intitiative is that we have to move quickly because if we don't, others will step in instead of us."
One of the backers of the new plan is Yuval Rabin, son of the late Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin who was assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995.
"Israel has no political direction," he said in an interview published yesterday in the top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily. "The prime minister will not initiate anything and he is not coming up with any alternative to the scenarios which I don't even want to think about," he told the paper.