CAIRO: Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said on Sunday that an Arab peace initiative stipulating that Arabs normalize ties with Israel in exchange for a full withdrawal from occupied land was not negotiable. The Arab initiative is not open for review, Moussa told a meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo. Any twisting of the Arab initiative will cause great harm to the Palestinian cause and can affect any movement towards a just peace, he said. Go back to the Arab initiative and you will see how flexible and balanced it is, he added. Moussa was responding to comments made earlier this week by Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who said the Jewish state cannot accept the Arab initiative as it stands. Under the plan, adopted by the Arab League at a summit in 2002, the Arab world would normalize ties with Israel in exchange for a full withdrawal from Arab land occupied since 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Other than the refugee issue, which the Arab plan wants solved based on UN Resolution 194 giving all Palestinian refugees the right to return and which Israel rejects, Livni cited the borders of a future Palestinian state as another point of contention. The borders should be discussed in the framework of future negotiations because a Palestinian state did not exist in 1967, nor were the West Bank and the Gaza Strip connected: the first was part of Jordan and the second, Egypt.
Therefore the dream of returning to the 1967 borders should not be considered the vision of a viable Palestinian state. That should be subject to negotiations, she said.
