Reuters, Paris :France warned on Friday it would recognize a Palestinian state if a final international effort to overcome the impasse between Israelis and Palestinians failed, and proposed a two-year timeframe to end the conflict through a U.N.-backed resolution.Lawmakers will hold a symbolic parliamentary vote on Dec. 2 on whether the French government should recognize Palestine as a state, a move that the Israeli Prime Minister has called a “grave mistake”. “If this final effort to reach a negotiated solution fails, then France will have to do what it takes by recognizing without delay the Palestinian state. We are ready,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told parliament. The parliamentary vote has raised domestic political pressure for the government to be more active on the issue. An IFOP poll showed 63 percent of French support a Palestinian state. Fabius told deputies that, were they to adopt the motion, it would not change Paris’ immediate diplomatic stance. But he said that, after similar moves in Sweden, Britain, Ireland and Spain, Paris could not ignore the “never-ending” conflict that was playing into extremists’ hands.”There needs to be support, some would say pressure, from the international community to help the two sides make the final step to peace,” Fabius said.Palestinians seek statehood in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as their capital – lands captured by Israel in a 1967 war.The latest round of efforts to forge a two-state solution collapsed in April. Palestinians see little choice but to push unilaterally for statehood.Fabius said Paris was working to get a United Nations Security Council resolution adopted that would relaunch and conclude negotiations within two years. Diplomats have said France, Britain and Germany are preparing a text that could be accelerated if a separate resolution drafted by Palestinians, and calling for an end to Israeli occupation by November 2016, is put forward. “We must fix a calendar because without one how do you convince anybody that it won’t just be another process?” Fabius said. He proposed that in parallel a conference be held with regional actors, European Union, Arab League and major powers.He did not specify at what stage France could decide to back a Palestinian state, but a diplomat said that it could happen anytime if Paris felt negotiations were dead. France does not classify Palestine as a state, but has supported Palestine’s membership of UNESCO and its non-member observer country status at the United Nations.Jerusalem report adds:: Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman proposed on Friday that Arab citizens of Israel be offered financial incentives to leave the country and relocate to a future Palestinian state. Lieberman, whose ultra-nationalist party is a core part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, has previously spoken about redrawing borders but not about using sweeteners to encourage Arabs to uproot to a Palestinian state.His proposals were made in the form of a manifesto, presented with expectations rising that Israel may have to hold early elections in the coming months as Netanyahu’s coalition frays. Elections are not formally due until 2017. Lieberman, one of the most strident voices in favour of the separation of Jews and Arabs, said Palestinians living in Jaffa and Acre, two mixed cities on the Mediterranean coast far from the West Bank, should be encouraged to move if they want. “Those (Israeli Arabs) who decide that their identity is Palestinian will be able to forfeit their Israeli citizenship and move and become citizens of the future Palestinian state,” he wrote in the manifesto, entitled Swimming Against the Stream, published on his Facebook page and his party’s website. “Israel should even encourage them to do so with a system of economic incentives,” he said.The last round of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, who seek a state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as their capital, collapsed in April.Lieberman has in the past called on Israeli Arabs, who make up about 20 per cent of Israel’s 8 million population, to take a loyalty oath if they want to remain in Israel, a measure that Netanyahu denounced at the time. But Netanyahu is now backing a contentious bill that would define Israel as the Jewish nation state and enshrine certain rights for Jews. Critics say it would discriminate against Arab-Israelis and put religion and ethnicity above democracy.The bill comes at a time of high tensions in Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, where a dispute over access to a religious site sacred to Jews and Muslims alike has ignited Palestinian streets protests and lethal attacks on Jews.A poll carried out in 2010, after Lieberman addressed the United Nations and set out plans for the borders of a future Palestinian state to be redrawn to include Arab towns in Israel, showed that 58pc of Israeli Arabs opposed the idea.
