Amid increasing calls for a diplomatic breakthrough to end rampant Israeli-Palestinian violence, a prominent leader of Israel's left-wing bloc has come up with a new Middle East peace initiative.
"We are on the verge of a (diplomatic) development in the region" Meretz MP Yossi Beilin insisted to reporters in Jerusalem, claiming that both sides, locked in deadly conflict since 2000, realise that "violence won't work".
Beilin, one of the "architects" of the 1993 Oslo peace accords but an opposition MP largely marginalised by Israeli governments, has therefore drawn up his own plan - "Mapping the Road from Realignment to Permanent Status".
The blueprint, he says, would be custom-made to fit the needs of moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert based on the principles of the internationally drafted but moribund roadmap. That plan, calling for two states living side by side in peace, has made practically no progress since its much-hyped launch in 2003.
Beilin's latest project comes with Israeli ministers, increasingly frustrated at military failures to curb Palestinian rocket attack, searching for some kind of diplomatic solution to the deadlock.
"If Israel does not take the initiative, it will leave the field empty for other, less favourable initiatives, to bridge the divide," Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni counselled this week after Israel rejected a new Middle East peace initiative pushed by France and Spain.
But Beilin's project met with a cool response from Olmert's office a time when the security cabinet has authorised attacks against Hamas institutions and targeted killings to combat daily Palestinian rocket attacks.
In the first phase of his plan, Beilin says both parties would cease all hostilities and agree to swap an Israeli soldier captured by militants on June 25 for an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners. Previous such efforts brokered by Egypt to secure the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit have achieved little since he was seized five months ago.
Three days after his capture Israeli launched an air and ground assault on the Gaza Strip which has killed more than 300 Palestinians. Three Israeli soldiers have also died in an offensive aimed at countering Palestinian rocket fire and freeing Shalit. Any new peace initiative also faces a complex reality in which the Palestinian government, led by the radical Hamas movement, is boycotted by Israel and the West, and the moderate Abbas is increasingly weakened at home.
The Hamas, which took office in March after winning a landslide election last January, has flatly refused to recognise the Jewish state's right to exist, renounce violence or accept past agreements with Israel.
But despite the difficulties, the 58-year-old Israeli politician hopes that if Abbas were to submit the peace plan to a referendum, it would convince Hamas, Israel and the world that the Palestinians "are ready to make peace".
Beilin stipulates that after both parties "maintain the quiet", Israel would withdraw by 2008 from a large part of the occupied West Bank, in keeping with an election promise shelved by Olmert after the 34-day summer war in Lebanon.
According to Beilin, once Israel withdraws from "90 percent of the West Bank" a Palestinian state would be declared, or alternatively, the rule of the existing Palestinian Authority extended.
Lastly, both sides would hold talks on a permanent status agreement, including the thorny issues of Palestinian refugees and control over Jerusalem's religious sites, which are holy to both Jews and Muslims. But Beilin, who sees himself as "a true optimist who always seeks a crack in the wall" in an effort to promote peace, has had a mixed track record.
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