- JERUSALEM (AFP) - A right-wing
Knesset member Tuesday accused high-profile Israeli leftists who drafted
an unofficial peace plan with the Palestinians of "treason" and
demanded they be sentenced to death or life imprisonment.
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- "Those who initiated the Geneva agreement have perpetrated
a crime of treason necessitating a death sentence or life imprisonement,"
Shaul Yahalom, who heads the radical National Religious Party (NRP), wrote
in a letter to Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein, according to a copy
obtained by AFP.
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- The symbolic Geneva peace plan was drawn up last week
between Israeli left-wingers, including former justice minister Yossi Beilin,
and leading Palestinians such as former information minister Yasser Abed
Rabbo.
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- Yahalom charged that the "Israelis behind this initiative
have devised an agreement whose goal is, among other things, to deprive
Israel of its sovereignty over the (Palestinian territories) and notably
Jerusalem."
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- According to available details, the plan provides for
shared sovereignty over disputed areas of the holy city of Jerusalem and
gives the Palestinians 97.5 percent of the West Bank.
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- In exchange, Palestinian refugees would waive their right
of return to areas now incorporated in the state of Israel as it was founded
in 1948.
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- It is likely to be "signed" next month in Switzerland,
possibly on November 4, the eighth anniversary of the assassination of
former peacemaking Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist.
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- Israel has applied the death penalty only once, against
Nazi SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the
Jewish Holocaust during World War II. He was hanged in a prison near Tel
Aviv in 1962.
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