Indirect negotiations mark first return to “peace process” since Gaza war
George
Mitchell meets Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem
yesterday as he began a round of regional talks lasting four months.
Photograph: Moshe Milner/EPA
The US vice-president, Joe Biden, is due in Israel tomorrow for an American diplomatic initiative to start indirect negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The
new round of so-called “proximity talks” could be announced as early as
tomorrow, but there is scepticism on both sides about the chance of any
agreement. George Mitchell, the US special envoy to the Middle East,
will shuttle between Israeli and Palestinian leaders for four months
hoping to find common ground. Although the talks are low-key, they mark
the first return to a peace process since Israel’s war in Gaza more than a year ago.
Mitchell
flew into Israel on Saturday night and met with Ehud Barak, the Israeli
defence minister, for 90 minutes. He saw Binyamin Netanyahu, the
Israeli prime minister, today and will meet Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas tomorrow.
Mitchell’s
team will handle the talks, while Biden’s visit is reportedly focused
on trying to win Israeli support for the US administration’s policy on
Iran and on discouraging Israel from any military action against the
Iranian regime over its nuclear ambitions.
Abbas won the support
of the Arab League and today the executive committee of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation to go ahead with the talks. Yet they represent
a partial climbdown for the Palestinian leader, who for a year has
insisted there will be no talks with Israel without a full halt to the
construction of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian territory.
However, construction continues, with Israel offering only a limited,
temporary halt that expires in a few months.
In a speech on
Saturday in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, Abbas warned the peace
process had “almost reached a dead end. The Israeli government
continues to procrastinate to gain time and strengthen its control of
the occupied territories to prevent any realistic possibility of
establishing an independent, viable … state of Palestine,” he said.
The
Palestinian leadership wants an independent state in Gaza and the West
Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem. However, Netanyahu says he will
not give up East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 war,
occupied and later annexed ‑ a move not recognised by the international
community. He also insists on holding on to large Jewish settlement
blocs in the West Bank and says Israel must maintain a key presence in
the Jordan valley, along the border with Jordan.
Some Israeli
commentators were doubtful about the new diplomacy and said the gap
between Israeli and Palestinian leaders was too wide to bridge. “If the
talks are held in the planned indirect format, they are not going to
lead anywhere,” wrote Shimon Shiffer, a columnist in the Yedioth
Ahronoth newspaper. “They are going to lead neither to increased trust
between the leaders nor to final status arrangement talks in the near
future.”
The diplomacy comes at a time of heightened tension.
There have been several days of clashes between Palestinians and
Israeli police at the Haram al-Sharif, or the Temple Mount, in
Jerusalem’s Old City. There has been criticism of an Israeli
announcement about more houses planned inside East Jerusalem
settlements and on Friday a 14-year-old Palestinian boy was critically
injured when he was shot in the head with an Israeli rubber-coated
bullet during a demonstration in Nabi Saleh, in the West Bank, against
Israeli confiscation of village land.
In Jerusalem on Saturday
night, more than 2,000 Israelis and Palestinians held a protest against
the eviction of Palestinian refugees and the growing presence of
rightwing Jewish settlers.