Palestinian officials don’t believe that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas’s Friday-scheduled meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and
French President Francois Hollande will bring them back to the negotiation
table.
The meeting, which Clinton requested, will discuss the
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the release of Palestinian detainees in
Israeli jails. The meeting agenda also includes a Palestinian plan to seek a UN
resolution that condemns settlements in the “occupied” territories.
Abbas
left the Palestinian territories Wednesday evening for Jordan, in a visit that
will also take him to France.
Xavier Abu Eid, an adviser at the Palestine
Liberation Organization Negotiations Support Unit, told The Jerusalem Post that
the release of 132 Palestinians whom Israel had detained before it signed the
Oslo Accords with the PLO in 1993, as well as a total settlement freeze, were
part of previous agreements Israel and the PLO had signed.
“If you need
to talk about a credible peace process, it’s only fair that the two parties
abide by previous agreements in order to sit together and negotiate again,” he
said.
Earlier this year, the two parties met in the Jordanian capital for
“exploratory talks” that failed to revive the peace process.
Abu Eid said
the PA was flexible in terms of meeting and opening a dialogue with Israeli
officials, but negotiations with Israel would require a total settlement
freeze.
Last month a presidential spokesperson declared that Abbas would
agree to meet with Prime Minister Binyamin Benjamin Netanyahu if he released the
ill detainees, plus those who had been detained before Oslo, and allowed police
weapons to enter the West Bank.
The peace process has been halted since
October 2010, as Israel refused to extend a 10-month partial moratorium on
settlement building.
Palestinians have declared that they want a total
settlement freeze before going back to negotiations, but Israel refuses any
preconditions to continuing the peace talks.
Abu Eid said the previous
settlement suspension in 2010 wasn’t a real one, as it excluded already-approved
buildings, building in east Jerusalem, and public buildings in the “occupied”
territories.
“International organizations admitted that there were 900
violations of the moratorium,” he said., adding, “We think that Israel uses the
peace process as a cover for building more settlements.
In 1990, the
settlers [numbered] 100,000, and now they are more than 500,000.”
Clinton
is expected to pressure Abbas on a decision the PLO executive committee made
last week to pursue a UN resolution condemning settlements.
An Abbas
diplomatic adviser told the Post earlier this week that the only gesture that
would prevent Palestinians from heading to the UN General Assembly was a
settlement freeze.
A senior Fatah official downplayed the results that
might come out from this meeting, but said that Clinton would try to convince
Abbas with Israeli confidence-building measures.
“She doesn’t have much
to offer. Israel is the one that decides if the negotiations will continue, and
they know how,” the official said, referring to a settlement freeze.
The
official said the Palestinian leadership wanted to go back to the negotiation
table, but under good terms.
“After two years of halting negotiations,
the PA didn’t gain anything,” he said.
Nevertheless, the latest popular
pressure on the PA in Ramallah makes it harder for the Palestinian leader to
accept going back to the negotiation table empty-handed.
“He [Abbas] has
to have a good reason to give his people [for] why he returned to talks after
having [insisted] on a settlement freeze all that time – it should be a
settlement freeze or something as good as that,” the official added.
On
Tuesday evening, hundreds marched from downtown Ramallah to Abbas’s headquarters
in the Mukata compound, protesting negotiations and condemning police violence
at previous rallies.
Two previous rallies weren’t allowed to reach the
Mukata in the beginning of the week, as PA security forces violently kept back
the crowd.
Abbas is also planning to meet with High Commissioner for
Foreign and Security Policy in the European Union Catherine Ashton, and the
foreign ministers of Britain and Norway. He is expected to discuss the latest
financial crisis in his tour.
On Tuesday, Finance Minister Nabil Qassis
announced that the PA was incapable of paying salaries to public employees this
month due to a financial crisis described as the biggest in the PA’s history.