Amid reports that US Middle East envoy George Mitchell will press Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu to chart out his position on borders clearly, Netanyahu made
clear before his meeting with Mitchell on Monday night that the first issues he
wants to tackle are recognition, security and refugees.
In a speech to
the Globes Business Forum a number of hours before meeting with Mitchell,
Netanyahu said that to achieve peace, “the issues that are truly delaying the
peace must be discussed: the question of recognition, the question of security,
the question of various arrangements, refugees, etc., and of course many
additional issues.”
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ObamaMitchell arrived back in the region on Monday to
discuss the core issues separately with each side in the hope that gaps could be
narrowed and direct negotiations restarted.
The question of which issue
to tackle first has long been a major point of dispute between the sides, with
the Palestinians wanting to focus first on borders and Jerusalem, and Israel on
refugees, recognition and security.
The sequence is significant, because
Israel is concerned that if the Palestinians get what they want on the border
issue, they will not be forthcoming on any of the issues that come later, such
as refugees.
And the Palestinians argue that if they cave in up front on
recognizing Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, Israel will have no
incentive to be forthcoming on borders or Jerusalem.
Mitchell, who went
into the meeting with Netanyahu within hours of arriving on Monday, is scheduled
to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on
Tuesday. From there, he is to travel to Doha, and then back to
Washington.
Before the meeting with Netanyahu, Mitchell said that during
the direct talks that Israel and the Palestinians held for a couple of weeks in
September, “both sides decided together to pursue a framework agreement that
would establish the fundamental compromises on all permanent-status issues, and
pave the way for a final peace treaty. That remains our goal.”
Quoting
from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on Friday, Mitchell said the
goal of the new American approach was to engage in good faith with both sides on
the core issues and “narrow the gaps between the two.”
By doing this, he
said, the parties could “begin to rebuild confidence, demonstrate their
seriousness and hopefully find enough common ground on which to eventually
relaunch direct negotiations and achieve that framework.”
Earlier in the
day, at the Globes conference, Netanyahu welcomed the US decision not to seek an
additional settlement moratorium, even though he said Israel had been prepared
to look into an extension of the freeze.
“I believe that the United
States has succeeded in understanding after a year and a half that we were, in
fact, on a dead-end road, in a discussion that was in great measure unproductive
regarding the peripheral issue of construction, of additional construction in
the settlements. The United States understood that what is important is getting
to the important issues, the substantial issues, including the core issues that
are at the root of the conflict between us and the Palestinians,” Netanyahu
said.
“I welcome the fact that it made this decision, although in the
discussions we conducted, we were prepared to examine an additional extension of
the moratorium,” he added.
In recent days, the prime minister, reacting
to criticism that Israel had said no to a simple US request to extend the
settlement freeze for another 90 days, said in private meetings that Israel had
not rejected the request. He said Jerusalem had been negotiating the details
with Washington, when the US backed away from the idea upon concluding – after
discussions with the Palestinians – that a further moratorium would not make
that much of a difference in the future of the talks.
“The United States
came to the conclusion, maybe even on the first day, regarding the additional 90
days, that if the Palestinians came to the table, they would talk about the 91st
day, about extending the moratorium. This is not the way to achieve peace,” he
said.
The prime minister said he hoped that the indirect talks through
Mitchell would succeed in narrowing gaps on the core issues so the sides would
then begin direct negotiations “with the goal of reaching a framework peace
agreement.”
The new US approach was “good for Israel, and it is good for
peace,” Netanyahu said.
Also on Monday, the EU’s 27 foreign ministers
issued a statement on the Middle East that stayed well within the parameters of
previous EU statements, and did not allude – as some feared it might – to any
intention to recognize a Palestinian state unilaterally if an agreement were not
reached within a certain period.
The Foreign Ministry issued a statement
saying there was “nothing new” in the EU statement, and that Israel welcomed the
statement’s repeated emphasis on the need to “reach a solution through
negotiations.”
At the same time, the ministry said it would have expected
a clearer call to the Palestinians to “resume the talks immediately.”