BICOM

Israel’s President Shimon Peres yesterday told European Union President Herman Van Rompuy that the opportunity to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians remains, but that terror not settlements is the main obstacle to doing so.

Peres, who is in Europe on a weeklong visit, held a press conference alongside Van Rompuy in Brussels yesterday. Peres said that with elections in Israel and the United States now over, there is “a new chance” of peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, adding “I don’t think the opportunity to make peace is over.” Peres further explained, “We weren’t born to become a master nation, we weren’t born to govern other people” and predicted “We will resume the negotiations. Neither us nor the Palestinians have any other choice.”

Van Rompuy said that a sustainable peace in the framework of a two-state solution would only happen when Palestinian aspirations for statehood and Israeli security needs are realised. He said, “For these reasons I have recalled the opposition of the European Union to the illegal expansion of settlements.”

However, Peres responded “I don‘t take this criticism that, because of the settlements, we lost the chance of implementing the two-state solution,” instead suggesting “The most important difficulty is not settlements but terror…Take terror out of Gaza and they have a free place, it has nothing to do with Israel.” Peres called on the EU to “Condemn Hamas…because they are a centre of terror…and Hezbollah [is] the same.”

The EU has so far resisted recent pressure to proscribe Hezbollah as a terrorist entity in the wake of a Bulgarian investigation which concluded that the group was to blame for a bus bomb at the Black Sea resort of Burgas, which killed five Israelis and one Bulgarian last summer.