Posted by
colorado springs citizen on Saturday, May 24, 2008 6:30:59 AM
Under the old roadmap proposed by the Mid-Eastern Quartet (America,
Russia, the UN, and the EU) in 2003, the warring parties were supposed
to recognize each other's right to exist and renounce violence, while
Israel was meant to gradually hand over to Palestinian control the
territories occupied during the 1967 war. But now the situation is
entirely different - Palestine is split, and Gaza is occupied by Hamas,
which cannot recognize Israel by definition. Its ideologists still
adhere to the 1964 Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) on the destruction of the "Zionist formation" (i.e. the state of
Israel), which was publicly renounced by Arafat.