Israel welcomes US decision to focus on core issues

Mon, 13 Dec 2010

Tel Aviv/Ramallah - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Monday a US decision to focus on the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, after an attempt to get Israel to freeze construction in West Bank settlements collapsed.

The decision, he told an economics conference in Tel Aviv "is good for Israel, and good for peace."

Netanyahu made his remarks days after the US said it was abandoning efforts to get Israel to freeze construction at its West Bank settlements for 90 days in order to resume direct peace talks.

The remarks also came just hours before US envoy George Mitchell arrived in the region and met with Netanyahu. Mitchell was due to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday.

By focussing on the "core issues" of the conflict, Mitchell said, "the parties can begin to rebuild confidence, demonstrate their seriousness, and hopefully find enough common ground on which to eventually re-launch direct negotiations and achieve that framework."

The US decision came because Washington realized that "the important thing is to reach the important topics, the issues at the core of our conflict with the Palestinians," Netanyahu said.

Direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which resumed at the beginning of September after a break of nearly two years, plunged into limbo at the end of that month when Israel's partial, limited 10-month freeze on construction at its West Bank settlements expired.

Abbas insisted that the talks would not resume until and unless the freeze was renewed.

A US proposal that Israel freeze construction for a further 90 days, in return for incentives, went nowhere.

Mitchell will be making his first visit to the region in three months.

Although Netanyahu welcomed the focus on the core issues of the conflict, Israel has yet to present its positions on them.

The key issues include Jerusalem, the borders of a future Palestinian state, the future of Palestinian refugees and their descendents, water, and the fate of Israeli settlements.

The Palestinian leadership for its part, said Monday that any future negotiations with Israel should be based on clear terms of reference, and said it insists on a change in the course of the negotiations and the peace process in general "in light of the dead end it has reached as a result of Israeli policies."

"The Palestinian leadership, and after we received some ideas from the US administration on the peace process, believes that any future serious political process should be based on what the Palestinian leadership has stressed," Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary-General Yasser Abed Rabbo said after a meeting of the PLO Executive Committee in Ramallah.

In particular, the Palestinians want recognition of the borders which existed between Israel and the West Bank before the 1967 war to serve as the borders of their future state, and a halt to all Israeli settlement activities.

Palestinians also wanted to see an end to the Israeli occupation "in all its forms," and an international force guaranteeing the security of the Palestinian borders, Abed Rabbo said, reading from a statement issued at the end of Executive Committee meeting.

He added that the Palestinian leadership held the Israeli government "fully responsible" for what he said was the failure of the US administration to get Israel to stop settlement activities in order to to restart direct negotiations.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/357997,decision-focus-core-issues.html.