Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Friday accused French President Jacques Chirac of encouraging a "return to terrorism" by supporting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's positions during peace talks.
"Chirac has heard some very hard things from me concerning his positions and their implications," Barak said in an interview on Israeli television.
The major source of conflict was apparently Chirac's support for an international commission to investigate the past week's violence.
"I said: Mr. President, if you give your support to Arafat's demand for an international inquiry, when we know it was Arafat who started the current terrorism, you would be encouraging a return to terrorism and I urge you to think twice about it," Barak told Israel's private Channel Two.
France has backed an international investigation into the past week's clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces, during which more than 80 people, mostly Palestinians, have died.
The United States has backed a "fact-finding commission," but has stopped short of insisting that it be international.
Barak, Arafat and US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met in Paris on Wednesday night, but their talks did not produce any formal agreement.
Barak's top adviser Danny Yatom earlier accused the French of helping dissuade Arafat from signing an accord, an allegation denied by Paris.
"Chirac gave Arafat the impression that he would be able to get much more," Yatom told Israeli public radio on Friday.
Arafat had been ready to formalize an accord that would have been signed the next day in Egypt, but France "contributed to the fact that at the end of the day Yasser Arafat did not sign, even though he told Albright that all the accords will be respected, whether written or verbal," Yatom had said Thursday.
Yatom's original comments were denied Friday by Chirac's office, which called the allegations "fantastic."
"It's untrue, it's ridiculous. These fantastic allegations do not correspond to factual reality, nor to the sense of France's diplomatic work," a spokesman for the French president said.
"Like the United States, France never stopped over the entire day pleading for calm and for the parties to reach an accord," the spokesman said.
But France's head rabbi, Joseph Sitruk, told Israeli radio that he had asked to see Chirac to protest against France's "unilateral" support for the Palestinian line -- JERUSALEM(AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
