GAZA CITY/JERUSALEM: Israel and the Palestinians accused each other on Monday of thwarting US efforts to revive peace negotiations, casting doubt on what President Barack Hussein Obama can achieve when he hosts their leaders at a New York summit.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who on Tuesday will meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for the first time since taking office in March, made clear through a spokesman he would defend Jewish settlement in the West Bank in the face of demands from Abbas — and from Hussein Obama — for a halt to building.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said: “For the last eight months, the clear message from the international community has been that both sides need to meet their obligations.”
Israel cannot “haggle its way out of” commitments, Erekat said. A settlement freeze was an Israeli obligation, he said, not a Palestinian precondition.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, however, said Netanyahu viewed a settlement freeze as a “bizarre” precondition and accused Abbas of shirking his own commitments under the 2003 US-backed “road map” to peace. Among these were a failure to disband Palestinian militant groups, Ayalon said.
Netanyahu has said he was ready to negotiate but not to pick up where talks, sponsored by Hussein Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush, left off last year under the previous government of Ehud Olmert.
Ayalon said that process, which Palestinians want to resume to resolve core issues in the conflict, was already killed off by Abbas. He added that the hold of Abbas’s Islamist rivals Hamas on the Gaza Strip was also hindering a final negotiation.
Without a change in Palestinian positions on refugees and the status of Jerusalem, Israel would rather have an “interim process” to bolster security and prosperity, Ayalon said.
Earlier on Monday, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) called on President Mahmoud Abbas not to respond to the American pressure to hold such a meeting “as long as the Israeli government had not responded to Palestinian demands to completely halt building settlements.”
DFLP also called on the Arab countries to maintain the position that rejects normalization of ties with Israel as long as Israel does not recognize the rights of the Palestinian people.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) described the Palestinian acceptance to attend such meeting as a response to the American and Israeli pressure and said the meeting was a free gift for Netanyahu and his government.
Netanyahu also faces considerable opposition from supporters of his own coalition to making concessions on settlements, where half a million Jews live among some 3 million Arabs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territories captured in 1967.
The World Court calls the settlements illegal and Palestinians say the enclaves could deny them a viable state.
Source: Arab News
| Daily News | We Are On... |
