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Mubarak Warns of violence in Case of Concessions on Jerusalem
Any concessions on Jerusalem by the Palestinians would prompt violence and terrorist acts that can not be controlled in the Middle East, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned on Sunday.
"The issue of Jerusalem is the most dangerous and difficult at the current stage of the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks," Mubarak said in an interview with Rose al-Youssef weekly carried in its Sunday edition.
"Any Palestinian concessions on Jerusalem will spark an explosion of the situation in the region in a way that no one will be able to control," he said, adding that "terrorists will come back and find strong justification for their actions."
Two weeks of negotiations at the Palestinian-Israeli summit at Camp David in the United States failed to reach a peace deal on July 25, mainly due to differences over Jerusalem, which both sides claim as their capitals.
Mubarak told the pro-government magazine that he has never and would never pressure Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to accept something that would not secure the interests of the Palestinian people.
Egypt has never imposed any ideas on Arafat and only supports his decisions to accept what he sees as congruent to the Palestinian goals and interests, and to reject whatever he sees as unjust, he reiterated
"Arafat's response was succinct and sincere when he told the Americans and Israelis at the Camp David summit that his own brother would kill him if he conceded Jerusalem or Al-Aqsa mosque," Mubarak said.
He stressed that nobody in the Arab or Islamic world can agree to compromise on East Jerusalem or Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third holiest site after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
The Egyptian president said another Palestinian-Israeli summit before September 13, the date the Palestinians set to declare statehood, was "still at the stage of speculation." But he said Egypt would try to help convene such a summit.
Israel occupied Arab East Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast War and later declared it its "eternal and indivisible capital," a claim not recognized by the international community. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future independent state.
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