[TIME] Interview with Tony Blair by Tim McGirk - Tony Blair, ex-British prime minister and current mediator for the Quartet, said: "The new Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] is really clear that he wants economic and security change on the West Bank. That's what we agreed we'd work on with him. There are one or two things that [Netanyahu's] term "economic peace" can mean. One, that economic development is a substitute for state, and that's obviously not acceptable. I personally think he wants the second, to build the [Palestinian] state from the bottom up. I understand and buy into that." "It's very hard for the international community to put the money into the Palestinian government where [Hamas] is saying, We reserve the right to use violence, to fire rockets at innocent Israeli civilians....Firing these rockets isn't just morally wrong - they're shooting at innocent civilians - but it's also tactically useless. At no level is it sensible."
2009-04-16 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive