Clinton after historic trip: I have achieved what I came here to achieve
US President Clinton said today "I just had a very good meeting, a very frank meeting, with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat. First, everyone agrees that yesterday's convening of all the Palestinian groups and the vote by the Palestinian National Council and the others to fully and forever reject the conflict with Israel and commit to a path to peace and cooperation was a truly historic day."
The president said in the meeting "The first thing that we agreed to do was to energize the Permanent Status talks. Keep in mind, the purpose of the Wye Agreement was to resolve the matters that had to be resolved so we could get into Permanent Status talks and try to get back as close as possible to the timetable set out in 1993. Secondly, we agreed to vigorously pursue the security issue through the appropriate committee. There is, I think, no space between the two sides in their understanding that maintaining security cooperation and minimizing security problems is the precondition to making all the rest of this work. It's what made Wye possible. Thirdly, the prisoner issue, as you know, is a difficult one, but an informal channel has been agreed to for dealing with that, and it was agreed to -- referred all the questions to that channel and to pursue that accordingly. Fourthly, there is a so-called steering committee which is basically a clearinghouse for a lot of the other specific issues agreed to at Wye -- questions of law enforcement, of weapons handling, of all the specifics there. They are going to meet today, and I anticipate that there will be agreement at the end of the day, at the end of this meeting, that a lot of the requirements of Wye for this next phase have, in fact, been met."
The president added that "I talked about this in my speech in Gaza yesterday; the importance of teaching children that a commitment has been made by these two people to be partners and to share this land together. It's a very important issue to the Israelis and one I think that the Palestinians recognize." This is what the president termed as "educational" issue that Israeli Prime minister insisted was important to him.
The president indicated that " one big issue that has been agreed to but the details haven't been worked out is the whole question of safe passage. And there is a committee on safe passage and I expect it to meet, if not today then very shortly, to continue to push forward on that."
Clinton said about the Palestinian annulling their charter amendments calling for the destruction of Israel "I want to compliment and applaud Chairman Arafat and all the others who were at that meeting who made the decision clear, public and unambiguous; that we now have to decide practical means to go forward, and I think we are well on the way to doing that. So I have achieved what I came here to achieve and I expect the Secretary of State to be back here in several weeks and we'll just keep at it."
On the redeployment that is scheduled for Friday, President Clinton said "the Israeli government in my meeting reaffirmed its commitment to the Wye process. And so we have to resolve a number of issues in order for the redeployment to go forward. I think it would be unfortunate if we got too far behind schedule and I hope we can keep pretty much to the schedule that's there. But, obviously, that remains to be worked out here. We believe in keeping to these schedules as much as possible and we work very hard to put all this back on track here. I do think that we are back on track. We're going to see this through, and I feel good about where we are now."
The president addressed Israeli concerns about Palestinian desire for statehood and stating so publicly by saying "I think both sides should observe, which is it is okay to advocate how you want this to come out. That's okay. Neither side should try to stop the other from saying what their vision of the future is. That would be a terrible mistake. But it is not okay to imply that we're not going to resolve all the matters that were listed in the Oslo Agreement for negotiations by negotiations. That is what we've got to do, and that's where I think the line ought to be drawn and the balance ought to be struck. If we stick with that, you know, we'll have fits and starts, it will be hard (in) parts, but we'll get through this. We'll get through this just fine and it will come out where it ought to."