Under the 'Roadmap,' Israel gets: an end to terrorist attacks and official palestinian recognition of Israel's right to exist.
Under the 'Roadmap,' the palestinians get: withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces from their cities and towns; a freeze on Israeli settlement activity; official Israeli acceptance of their "right" to statehood; an end to arrests, targeted killings and deportations of known palestinian terrorist murderers; elimination of checkpoints and curfews; jobs and markets in Israel; massive economic assistance; reopening of the institutions in East Jerusalem that they previously used to undermine Israeli sovereignty; and, ultimately, a state of their own.
It's not enough.
Failure by Israel to release Palestinian detainees would pose “the biggest single threat” to the success of the ceasefire and the US-sponsored “roadmap” peace plan, Abbas said last Wednesday.
"If we wait for three months without any release of the prisoners, the ceasefire will break down. If they assassinate anybody ... it will collapse," Abbas told Reuters.
As has been pointed out here and here (and now here, too) and many other places as well, the 'Roadmap' says nothing about the release of palestinian detainees. The limited release of prisoners proposed by Israel is an extra, a goodwill gesture, a spontaneous, misguided attempt to "strengthen" the hand of Abu Mazen so that he can gain popularity and respect. But it's still not enough. Let's forget the whole thing, then, shall we?
Initial reaction from opposition Palestinian groups, which recently announced a truce conditional on the release of all prisoners, was largely negative.
A senior official for Hamas said the move was “insufficient” while Islamic Jihad said the Israelis were giving false hope to families of detainees.
"We demand the liberation of all the detainees and in particular those from Hamas and we are not prepared to accept discrimination in this regard," Hamas official Ismail Hanyeh told AFP.
But he said that the move represented a "first step" while reiterating that that the release of "all those in detention" remained a condition of the ceasefire agreed last weekend.
No, I thought not. They'll take the limited release as a "first step" toward the liberation of all detainees. Just as they'll take Gaza, Judea and Samaria as a "first step" toward the liberation of all "Palestine" -- from the river to the sea. Sounds like a plan to me.
