By DPA
Jakarta : A final solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be in place before the end of 2008, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said here Monday ahead of an anticipated international peace conference in the US.
Abbas, seeking support from Muslim allies in South-East Asia, said in a brief prepared statement following talks with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono that he was hoping for a final resolution within a year.
But he also said that any peace process with Israel must include Hamas, the rival Palestinian political movement that split with Abbas’s government following its armed seizure of the Gaza Strip.
“The Hamas movement is part of the Palestinian people and cannot be separated, and nobody denies that,” Abbas told reporters.
“However, they have carried out a coup d’etat against the legitimate government that could divide our national unity and dissolve the efforts that we have been developing to seek a solution for our country,” he said. “Ideally, they should have returned to the original (political status quo), but frankly we cannot move unless we work together.”
After Hamas seized Gaza in June, Abbas fired the militant movement’s members from his cabinet and set up a new government in the West Bank, which is controlled by his Fatah Movement.
The Bush administration has since thrown its weight behind Abbas in order to isolate Hamas, which has refused to recognise Israel or negotiate with it, and restart the peace process with Israel.
The US is scheduled to host a peace conference next month in Annapolis, Maryland, to be attended by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s Arab neighbours, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the G-8, and Muslim nations Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Abbas has said the conference would be useless if it concluded without advancement on the core issues of the conflict, including occupied land, the status of Jerusalem, and the return of millions of Palestinian refugees.
Earlier, Abbas said Sunday Palestinians were ready to implement the road map for peace with Israel.
This readiness is based on the belief of Muslim countries that they can normalise relations with Israel “if, and it’s a big if, Israel withdraws from Arab and Palestinian lands it has occupied since 1967”, Abbas had said according to media reports Monday.
During his comments Monday, Abbas called for Syria and Lebanon to also be invited — a message intended for the Bush administration, which does not want Syria or Iran to be there.
Although Hamas is increasingly isolated in Gaza — its 1.4 million people are sealed inside and the Hamas leadership has little international support — it can still attempt to scuttle the peace process being pursued by Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert through armed attacks against Israel.
Abbas was in Malaysia on Sunday before arriving last night in Indonesia, the country with the largest number of Muslims in the world. He was scheduled to leave the capital Jakarta Monday afternoon and fly to Brunei on the final stop of his Asian trip.