Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will deliver a “political letter”
to Israel and a number of other countries next week outlining the Palestinians’
conditions for resuming the peace process, Azzam al-Ahmed, a member of the Fatah
central committee, said on Thursday.
Ruling out the possibility that the
peace talks would resume soon, Ahmed said the Palestinians were waiting to see
what decisions the Quartet members – the US, EU, UN and Russia – would make
during their meeting in New York next week.
“The Palestinians cannot
accept the continuation of the stalemate in the peace process,” Ahmed said,
without elaborating.
Earlier this week, Palestinian officials in Ramallah
described Abbas’s letter to Israel as the “mother of all letters.”
They
said it would hold Israel responsible for the failure of the peace process
because of its insistence on building in the settlements and refusal to
recognize the pre- 1967 lines as the basis for a two-state
solution.
Abbas plans to send copies of his letter to the Quartet and
other countries before delivering it to Israel, the officials added.
The
PA reiterated on Tuesday its refusal to return to the negotiating table unless
the Israeli government meets its two conditions – a full cessation of settlement
construction and recognition of the June 4, 1967 lines as the future borders of
a Palestinian state.
The PA stance was relayed to Jordanian Foreign
Minister Nasser Judeh, who made a brief visit to Ramallah during which he met
with Abbas and top PA officials.
Judeh came to Ramallah to urge the PA to
agree to the resumption of the preliminary talks with Israel that were held
earlier this year in Amman.
Following the visit, Abbas convened a meeting
of the PLO Executive Committee to discuss the Jordanian request.
The
committee said after the meeting that the Palestinians would pursue their
efforts to win UN recognition of a Palestinian state “in the wake of the
large-scale settlement construction in occupied Jerusalem and the West
Bank.”
Chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat declared on Thursday that the
Palestinians wanted to resume the peace talks with Israel, but only if building
in the settlements stopped.
Erekat denied that Abbas’s “mother of all
letters” to Israel would include any threats. He was responding to
unconfirmed reports that the letter would contain a threat to dismantle the PA
and walk away from the peace process.