Reuters - Cheney calls for painful concessions for Mideast peace

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Cheney calls for painful concessions for Mideast peace

Sunday, Mar 23, 2008 5:4PM UTC

By Tabassum Zakaria

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday that achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace would require painful concessions from both sides.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who met Cheney at the Palestinian Authority's Muqata headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said Israeli settlement expansion, military checkpoints and raids were blocking progress towards peace.

The two convened shortly after the Palestinian leader's Fatah faction and its Hamas Islamist rival signed a Yemeni-sponsored reconciliation deal vowing to revive direct talks.

Neither Cheney nor Abbas commented publicly on the agreement.

Hamas, which opposes Abbas's peace efforts, seized the Gaza Strip from Fatah in fighting last June. Differences remained over the future of the territory of 1.5 million Palestinians despite the factions' willingness to try to mend fences.

Speaking to reporters, Cheney said achieving U.S. President George W. Bush's vision of a Palestinian state living alongside a secure Israel, "will require tremendous efforts at the negotiating table and painful concessions on both sides".

"It will also require a determination to defeat those who are committed to violence and who refuse to accept the basic right of the other side to exist," said Cheney, on his first visit as vice president to the Palestinian territories.

The United States and other Western countries have said there could no contacts with Hamas until it recognized Israel, renounced violence and accepted existing interim peace deals.

"We also repeat our rejection and condemnation of the launching of rockets at Israel from the Gaza Strip," Abbas said. "We believe that a real peace can put an end to this conflict."

Cheney said "terror" and the cross-border rocket attacks, which militant groups call a response to Israeli assaults, "do not merely kill innocent civilians, they also kill legitimate hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian people".

Earlier, after talks with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, Cheney said the United States was doing its utmost "to try to move the peace process forward".

Cheney kicked off a day of talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders by attending an Easter service in a small stone chapel at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem.

He then met Israeli President Shimon Peres, who told him "time is of the essence" in U.S.-brokered negotiations with the Palestinians that Washington hopes can lead to a peace deal by the time George W. Bush leaves office in January.

Bush made his first presidential visit to Israel and the West Bank in January. He is expected to make another trip soon.

(Additional reporting by Wafa Amr in Ramallah; Writing by Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Editing by Giles Elgood)