U.S., Europe Increase Pressure on Israelis, Palestinians to Save Talks
International pressure on Israel and the Palestinians to resolve a dispute over Israeli construction in Jewish settlements escalated today amid reports both sides rejected the latest U.S. proposals to keep peace talks alive.
U.S. envoy George Mitchell held a second round of discussions today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, also met the two leaders.
“We are determined to continue our efforts to find common ground between the parties to enable the direct negotiations to continue,” Mitchell said after meeting Abbas yesterday.
Netanyahu allowed a 10-month partial moratorium on construction in the West Bank to expire on Sept. 26, while Abbas has said he won’t pursue talks with building under way. The Israeli leader said in a statement today that he was working with Mitchell to try to keep negotiations on track.
Netanyahu rejected an Obama administration proposal to extend the partial freeze on West Bank settlement building in return for U.S. security guarantees, Haaretz reported today, citing unidentified senior U.S. officials. Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev, said Israel wouldn’t comment on the content of the discussions with Mitchell.
The U.S. guaranteed to help Israel maintain security after a Palestinian state is established along its eastern border in the Jordan Valley, in order to prevent arms smuggling into the area, according to a report published this week on the website of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an independent research center.
Rejection by Abbas
The U.S. also offered Abbas explicit support for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, if he agrees to continue direct talks with Israel after the end of the building freeze, Maariv said. Abbas has turned down the proposal, the Israeli daily reported, without saying how it obtained the information.
Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath said Abbas would accept nothing less than a continuation of the construction moratorium. “Even that is a compromise,” he said in a telephone interview. “It is not a watertight or airtight arrangement. We seek a total freeze on building.”
Lieberman’s UN Speech
The Obama administration was frustrated by the Israeli refusal to extend the moratorium and didn’t accept that Netanyahu was constrained by political difficulties, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported. Those difficulties were highlighted this week in a speech by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman at the United Nations in which he voiced expectations that it would take “decades” to achieve peace.
Lieberman’s party, the second-largest in Netanyahu’s coalition, joins most of the parties in the government, including Netanyahu’s own Likud faction, that support building in the settlements.
Netanyahu also faces pressure from European governments including the U.K. and France, which have expressed regret that Israel didn’t extend the building freeze.
“I have urged Israel to continue the moratorium,” Ashton told reporters in Jerusalem before leaving the region.
Yossi Beilin, the former deputy foreign minister who helped negotiate the 1993 Oslo Accords, said Netanyahu is holding back on extending the freeze and waiting for “the highest price.”
“Nobody will convince me that it was possible to get a consensus for 10 months and now it’s impossible to get a two- month extension, when Obama is saying, ‘I have new gifts for you,’” said Beilin, who now heads the business consulting company Beilink. “Netanyahu is not bringing the proposal to the inner Cabinet of seven ministers not because there is no majority but because he wants something more than that.”
Fatah, Hamas Rift
Gidi Grinstein, a former Israeli negotiator, said it’s in the Palestinians’ interest for the talks to fall apart.
“The Palestinians are now in a historic constitutional crisis with the rift between Fatah and Hamas and the split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” said Grinstein, now head of the Reut Institute policy and strategy group in Tel Aviv. “They dread a political process that will lead them to a moment of truth: that they will have to ratify in the absence of a parliament.”
Hamas seized full control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, ending a partnership government with Abbas’s Fatah party that began after Hamas won a majority in Palestinian parliamentary elections the previous year. The Islamic militant group is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., the European Union and Israel.
Construction Resumes
The freeze, declared by Netanyahu in November in what he said was a bid to bring Palestinians to the negotiating table, excluded about 3,000 homes as well as some public buildings.
Israeli building crews began work this week at settlements including Ariel, Oranit, Tekoa and Adam, according to Naftali Bennett, director-general of the Yesha Council, which represents more than 300,000 settlers in the West Bank.
Israel has built about 120 settlements in the West Bank since the late 1960s. Another 100 smaller settlements, which Israel calls outposts, were built during the past decade.
The United Nations says the settlements are illegal, and the International Committee of the Red Cross says they breach the Fourth Geneva Convention governing actions on occupied territory. President Barack Obama has said the settlements aren’t legitimate.
Israel says the settlements don’t fall under the convention because the territory wasn’t recognized as belonging to anyone before the 1967 war, in which Israel prevailed, and therefore isn’t occupied.
To contact the reporters on this story: Calev Ben-David in Jerusalem at cbendavid@bloomberg.net; Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net.
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