Word: shamir
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ISRAEL Confidence is the basis of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's intransigence. Israel has the lands the Arabs want back -- the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights -- and does not anticipate being forced to return them. Only a defeat in war would bring that about, and who would deliver it? Iraq, previously Israel's fiercest enemy, has been neutered. Syria can no longer rely on now impoverished Moscow to bankroll its military machine, which runs on Soviet technology that was shown to be inferior in the gulf war. Egypt, which made a separate peace with Israel...
Soon after Shamir's statement, other members of the Israeli government went even further than the prime minister in voicing Israel's desire for peace negotiations. In a speech on March 17, Minister of Health Ehud Olmert said that once Arab states sit down at the bargaining table, everything would be up for discussion--including, in Syria's case, the status of the Golan Heights...
...March 5, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said, "We are ready to talk to any and every Arab country about peace without any preconditions." He reaffirmed that Israel stands by its two-track peace plan of May 1989, which would lead to autonomy for Palestinians in the occupied territories...
Olmert began his talk by saying that he was speaking on behalf of the prime minister. Shamir later distanced himself from the minister's remarks, but more as a result of political pressure than of a real difference of opinion over the territorial question. Olmert is, after all, the prime minister's right-hand man and frequently a mouthpiece for Shamir's foreign policy announcements...
...Shamir said he was "not happy with Olmert" and added that in any negotiation "we shall say we do not agree to withdraw" from the Golan. The small rightist Tehiya party threatened to quit the government coalition if the idea of withdrawing was so much as discussed in the Cabinet. Housing Minister Ariel Sharon spoke of building enough apartments in the heights to balloon the area's Jewish population from 11,000 to 31,000. (About 15,000 non-Jews, mostly Druze, also live there...