Former Ambassador Dore Gold responded to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's statements at the Jerusalem Conference Tuesday morning. "I think the Foreign Minister came here with the best of intentions, to reach forward to both sides of the political spectrum," he said. "But the idea that we will negotiate presently about an agreement to be implemented in the future has serious implications."
"If you speak in a public forum and you say ‘Time is running out for Israel,’ what does that do to your Palestinian negotiating partner?" he asked.
"I was involved in negotiations in the 90s with Abu Mazen Yasser Arafat, Saeb Erakat – the whole crew. The lesson I learned is this: you have to assume the other side will violate the agreement. You can’t get out of the Jordan Valley and just hope the Palestinian state will be demilitarized. Because the day after, you will have the Philidelphi Corridor times 40 all along the Jordanian border. You have to take into account that if you create a 'shelf agreement' – make it today to be taken down in 2012, when the situation is right - what is going to stop the international community from making us take it down in 2009.
"There was a thing called the Road Map, that required implementation of the initial commitments before any sort of negotiations begin. But they are going on. So the shelf agreement will lead to the same, but with us in a much worse position."
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Beginning at 3 p.m. Tuesday, recorded sessions from the Jerusalem Conference will be posted with English translation on demand here. A live broadcast from the conference is available in Hebrew by clicking on the "play" button of the video screen here.