Word: shamir
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Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir proposed limited elections in the Palestinian territories as a step toward Middle East peace. That is not how the Palestinians there regard it. Last week more than 80 leaders from the West Bank and Gaza issued a statement rejecting the proposal as "a maneuver for the media" designed to sidestep the Palestine Liberation Organization and "ignore our political legitimacy as well as our legitimate aspirations...
Elections would be acceptable, they said, only as part of a defined process leading toward Palestinian independence. The statement was also intended to remind exiled P.L.O. leaders, who had avoided an outright rejection of the Shamir plan in their dialogue with the U.S., not to squelch the uprising without exacting major concessions from Israel...
...downplayed the diplomatic damage by maintaining that the Shamir proposal remained "very much alive." But some hard-liners in Israel have rejected the election plan. Administration sources say the negative positions taken by the Palestinians and some Israelis are just part of a bargaining process that could yet make elections possible as part of a comprehensive solution...
...surge in violence seemed to undermine plans by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to cool off the uprising by holding elections in the occupied territories. Neither Palestinians nor Israelis appear ready to end their violent confrontation...
...Bush Administration, such protests are not necessarily all bad. Rather than pressure Shamir directly, Bush's top advisers seem content to let the intifadeh do it for them. "We can let the uprising proceed, let the pressures continue to work on public opinion in Israel and the United States," explains a senior Bush adviser, "and try to channel those pressures in constructive directions." So for the time being, the Administration feels that the best policy is one of patient incrementalism. "The President does not believe conditions now exist for making peace, but he would like to see those conditions fostered...