On the even of her arrival to the Palestinian lands this morning, US Secretary of State Rice called yesterday on the Arabs and the Israelis to grasp the "opportunities" to activate the peace process. Before her meeting with her Israeli counterpart, Rice said: It is a phase full of opportunities, and it is high time for grasping these opportunities. We have to move carefully because we don’t want to waste this opportunity because of lack of preparedness.

In the meantime, Israeli FM Livni said: we will not waste this opportunity; we will not waste the opportunity to encourage dialogue with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian government.

However, Israeli PM Olmert stressed later on two points: Hamas Movement must be kept out of the game and handing over control to the forces of Abbas in the West Bank will not happen until Israel feels that its security is guaranteed. Livni said it is important to place the important issues on the table with the Palestinians but the Israeli government is not ready yet to accept the proposal of Abbas to negotiate over the final status issues. when asked if Israel is ready to talk about the more difficult issues, such as the borders in the future with a Palestinian state and Jerusalem and the refugees, Livni said sometimes it is not wise to start discussions on the most sensitive issues. the spokesperson for the Israeli government said: Olmert and Rice talked about security cooperation in the future with the Palestinians and the Israeli security concerns, especially in relation to transfer of security control in several regions and the Israeli condition that such transfer shall not take place until Israel gets appropriate security guarantees. He added: Israel wants guarantees that terrorism will not show up again in those regions. Such security concerns have not been met yet.

Palestinian officials said: Focus in the talks today will be on the political issue, especially the demand to launch final-status negotiations and make use of the time remaining for President Bush in his post to implement the two state vision.

Information Minister Dr. Al-Malki said the Palestinian government will raise three issues in the meeting with Rice: 1) The need to resume the final status negotiations until we reach the Palestinian state; 2) To exert pressure on the Israeli government to enable the Palestinian government to implement its security plan in the West Bank; 3) we want to talk about an emergency economic plan that the government prepared for the next six months; it is an emergency plan which needs budgets and financial resources and we want to present the plan to Rice to see the possibilities for the US assistance and support to this plan to provide job opportunities, and alleviate poverty and unemployment in the Palestinian lands and activate the economic development quickly.

Published at Al Ayyam NewsPaper on August 2, 2007