BRUSSELS (EJP)---The Middle East Quartet Special Representative, Tony Blair, told a European Parliament panel that the present international community strategy toward Gaza “is not working.”
“We need a different strategy for Gaza, a strategy which isolates the extremists and helps the people who are suffering. At the moment, we got the opposite. That is not intelligent," Blair said Tuesday at a meeting in Brussels of the EU parliament’s working group on the Middle East.
The panel, chaired by European Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering, discussed the situation in the region since the December 2007 donor's conference which brought 7.7 million dollars in aid to the Palestinians.
Blair didn’t call for talks with Hamas which is listed as a terrorist group both in the US and the European Union.
He said it was urgent for more food and other goods to reach Palestinians living under miserable conditions in the Gaza strip.
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The former British Prime Minister is since last year the special envoy of the "Quartet" of Mideast mediators, comprised of the United States, the EU, Russia and the United Nations.
He said the Middle East was "approaching crunch time," adding there must be visible results by May – when US president Bush is scheduled to be back in the Mideast- if there is to be an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement by the end of this year.
“We are racing against time,” Blair, who is often cited as the future first president of the European Union under the new EU Treaty, said.
Credibility gap
According to Blair, "the essence of the conflict is a credibility gap which explains the distance between what the two parties want - a two-state solution- and what is perceived by the Israeli side and the Palestinian side."
Blair said his strategy is "to change that context" to allow politicians from both sides to convince their own people of the ncessity of a peace agreement
“Political negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians continue but they need a significant change on the ground,” he said, speaking of “confidence-building measures” for the Palestinians and 'upgraded Palestinian security capability for the Israelis' as urgent priorities.
He argued that by improving the Palestinian security capability for Israel on the one hand and easing the burden of Israeli occupation on the other, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders can pass "the minimum credibility threshold" to persuade their peoples that a "two-state" solution is viable.
“But if things stay as they are then it will be extremely difficult for a negotiation about two states to succeed, because to the people it will seem that the negotiation is taking place divorced from the reality of the lives they are leading,” Blair added.
Among other speakers at the meeting, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Hahr Stoere stressed the importance of Palestinian reconciliation, and Jean-Pierre Jouyet, French State Secretary for European Affairs spoke of the need for Israel to make “concrete gestures” on the ground by stopping the settlement policy in the West Bank.
Several MEPs spoke out against the isolation of Hamas, with whom the EU and the US refuse to discuss because it has refused to renounce violence and recognize Israel.
Calling Gaza a "concentration camp", Spanish Josep Borrell, a former president of the European Parliament who now chairs the European Parliament development committee, said: "The policy of isolating Hamas has not brought any results. Hamas exists and we have to help the Palestinians reconcile. You cannot make arrangements with just one part of the other side."
