KEY POINTS:
If a Palestinian state is not created "the state of Israel is finished", Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned in an interview published yesterday.
In unusually frank comments, Olmert said the alternative was a South African-style apartheid struggle.
The explosive reference to apartheid came as Olmert returned from a peace conference in the United States, hoping to prepare a skeptical nation for difficult negotiations with the Palestinians.
Just hours after his return, the Israeli leader received an important boost when police recommended that prosecutors drop an investigation into whether Olmert illegally intervened in the Government's sale of a bank two years ago. The threat of indictment in the case cast a cloud over Olmert for months.
While Olmert has long said that the region's demography is working against Israel, the comments published in the Haaretz daily were among his strongest. Israeli officials have long rejected any comparison to the racist system once in place in South Africa.
Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed this week at a summit in Annapolis, Maryland, to resume peace talks with the Palestinians after a seven-year freeze. The two leaders pledged efforts to reach an agreement on the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of next year.
In the interview, Olmert said it was a vital Israeli interest to create a Palestinian state due to the growing Arab population in the area.
"The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights," Olmert told Haaretz. "As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."
The interview was published on the 60th anniversary of the historic UN decision to partition Palestine, setting up separate Jewish and Arab states. The vote led to a war, and the Palestinian state was not created.
The Palestinians want to form their state in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and east Jerusalem - areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
Jews are a solid majority inside Israel, comprising roughly 80 per cent of the population of 7 million. However, if the West Bank and Gaza are included, Arabs already make up nearly half the population.
To ensure that Israel can maintain its character as a democracy with a solid Jewish majority, Olmert supports a withdrawal from much of the West Bank and parts of east Jerusalem, following Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005.
Gazans complained yesterday that they were running out of fuel, blaming an Israeli decision to cut back on fuel supplies. However, the private Israeli company that sells fuel to Gaza said the problem was that Gaza was not paying its bills - an issue that repeats itself every few months and is usually resolved quickly.
Israel's 1.5 million Arab citizens have the right to vote, but the estimated 3.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza do not have Israeli citizenship or rights.
- AP
