HERZLIYA, Israel — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Thursday that Israel was willing to move some Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip but delivered an ultimatum that Palestinians had only a few months to make peace or Israel would impose its own solution.
Palestinians, Israeli "doves" and Jewish settlers promptly criticized Sharon’s long-awaited policy speech. The White House credited Sharon with taking significant steps toward peace but criticized any go-it-alone moves by Israel that would undercut negotiations on a U.S. "road map" peace plan to create a Palestinian state by 2005.
Under Sharon’s "disengagement plan," Israel would pull back from some of the area it conquered in the 1967 Mideast War and relocate some settlements to create a more easily defended security boundary and reduce the number of Israelis in Palestinian areas. Israel would also speed up construction of a contentious barrier of fences, walls and trenches, whose planned path dips deep into the West Bank.
"This reduction of friction will require the extremely difficult step of changing the deployment of some of the settlements," Sharon said, without naming the settlements that would be taken down.
Sharon’s plan, which he unveiled in a speech to a security conference in the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya, came in the face of intense domestic pressure to take action to end the violent conflict that has unnerved Israelis and badly damaged the economy over the past three years.
The idea of a forced partition also reflects Israeli concerns about demographic projections that Arabs will, within a few years, outnumber Jews in the area currently controlled by Israel.
Sharon said Israel remained committed to the road map, but demanded Palestinians begin dismantling militant groups, as called for by the peace plan, or face an Israeli-imposed security border.
"We are interested in conducting direct negotiations, but do not intend to hold Israeli society hostage in the hands of the Palestinians. … We will not wait for them indefinitely," Sharon said. "If there is no progress toward peace in a matter of months, "then Israel will initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians," he said.
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