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Thu, Oct 28, 2010 | Jpost

Salam Fayyad

Palestinians Will Declare Independent State In August 2011

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said the PA will declare an independent Palestinian state in 2011, while picking olives with a reporter from Italian daily Corriere Della Sera, according to an interview published on Thursday.

“The deadline is next summer, when the Israeli occupation of the West Bank must end,” Fayyad said. “In 2011, we will celebrate 66 years of the United Nations and the United Nations will celebrate the birth of our nation.”

Fayyad added that the Palestinians “need to build national institutions in the West Bank and prepare for an independent Palestinian state.”

“The people of Gaza must be involved in our national project,” Fayyad explained. “There are gaps between us, it’s true, but the real gap is the wall that closes off the Strip. Next week, I will try to enter Gaza,” he added.

“In Palestine we have 15 million” olive trees, Fayyad said. “We can not accept that even one is destroyed. The youngest of these trees have deeper roots than the largest Israeli settlement.”

“Look at those houses up there in Shiloh,” he said, “they are illegal not because I say so, but in international law. Israel considers UN resolutions as mere recommendations.”

The Palestinian prime minister said that he will give Israel “one more year of grace…but these colonies can no longer be there. They are illegal everywhere; here and Jerusalem.” [Read more: JPost, Thu, Oct 28, 2010]

The Palestinian Authority is considering alternatives if peace talks with Israel fail, including pressing the United States to recognize a unilateral declaration of statehood and to take the demand to the United Nations.

It’s not the first time Salam Fayyad is mentioning the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian State. On April 3 [2010] he was interviewed by the popular Arabic paper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, and reiterated his plan to establish the institutions and infrastructure of an independent Palestinian state and that this would be implemented in the middle of 2011. [CrethiPlethi, Apr 08, 2010]

And in november 2009, several statements have been made by senior members of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority regarding plans to unilaterally declare the establishment of a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders and East Jerusalem as its capital, and to that end to appeal to the the UN Security Council. [CrethiPlethi, nov 20, 2009]

UN could back Palestinians plans for statehood by August

The United Nations Security Council could support the Palestinian’s unilateral bid for statehood if Israel does not renew its freeze on new settlement construction, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry warned Israel on Tuesday.

“If the freeze is not renewed, then yes, maybe this is going to happen,” Serry said as he spoke with The Jerusalem Post in an olive grove in the West Bank village of Turmus Aiya, located in the Binyamin Region near the Shiloh settlement.

He held a joint event there with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to mark the founding of the UN 65 years ago. But he qualified his remarks by noting that he was an official of the UN and not a member of the Security Council, whose 15-member body would make such a decision. He added that recognition of Israel as a Jewish state was an understood part of a two-state solution.

“What is the essence of a two state solution,” Serry said. “It is about two home lands for two peoples, the Palestinian and the Jewish people.”

Serry said that the Palestinians were ready for statehood and threw his support behind Fayyad’s two-year plan, first announced in August 2009, to prepare Palestinian institutions for statehood by that same time in 2011. [Read more: JPost, Thu, Oct 28, 2010]

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said in the past that “there is no substitute for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and any unilateral attempt outside that framework will unravel the existing agreements between us, and could entail unilateral steps by Israel.”

A source in the Prime Minister’s Office said today that Netanyahu, like Serry, also believes Palestinian statehood is “doable.” But, he said, “the path to the realization of Palestinian sovereignty can only be through direct negotiation with Israel, where leadership on both sides are willing to take historic decisions.” [JPost; Thu, Oct 28, 2010]