Sharon Would Hem In Any Palestinian State

Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon said Wednesday that he believed any future independent Palestinian state should be strictly limited in its military potential and foreign ties and should be hemmed in by Israel.

Speaking before the Institute for Foreign Relations, a French think tank, Sharon gave what aides said were his most detailed thoughts to date on the geographical outline of two buffer zones that he believes would have to exist on either side of the West Bank.

Sharon had created a flurry earlier in the day when he made a rare mention of the possibility of an independent Palestinian state in an interview published in the French daily Le Monde.

In later fleshing out the idea before the think tank, he set out numerous conditions likely to be unacceptable to Arabs.

“For us, a real independent Palestinian state is a real danger. Therefore, what they call a state would be within the limits and conditions they would have to accept if they got what they called a Palestinian state,” he said.

“There will be limitation of weapons, there will be limitation of alliances with other countries, and Israel will have the right to fly over this area,” he said.

Sharon also outlined the two buffer zones, one in the sparsely populated Jordan Rift Valley between the West Bank and Jordan, and the other along the pre-June 1967 cease-fire line that was Israel’s boundary before the Six-Day War that month.

He said that those Palestinians who reside within the second zone would be citizens of the Palestinian state but that security for the zone would also be in Israeli hands.

Asked about Jewish settlements in occupied territories, he said nearly all West Bank settlements were within the proposed zones.

He was not clear about the fate of settlements outside the zones. “I don’t see why any of these settlements would be removed,” he said, noting that Arabs live in the predominantly Jewish cities of Tel Aviv and Beersheba.

It was not clear if he meant that Jews in those settlements would live under Palestinian control or would remain under Israeli jurisdiction.

Sharon said he had accepted since 1977 that Palestinian autonomy would inevitably lead to a Palestinian state. But he warned the Palestinian Authority not to declare independence unilaterally.