US Secretary of State John Kerry hurtles into 2014 with a trip to the Middle East Wednesday, hoping to make this the year Israel and the Palestinians seal a long-elusive peace deal.
Waving aside sceptics, the top diplomat will embark on his 10th tour to Israel and the West Bank aiming to hammer out a framework to guide the final tough months of talks.
After getting the two sides back to the negotiating table in 2013 after a three-year hiatus, Kerry was “starting the new year with a special effort to try to move the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations forward,” a senior State Department official said.
After months of intense, secretive talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, Kerry is hoping to set out an agreed framework that will establish a vision of what a final peace deal would look like.
It would provide “a basis upon which one could negotiate the final peace treaty because the outlines or the guidelines for what the final deal would look like would be agreed upon, and then you would work intensively to fill out the details,” according to the official.
Both sides have now held about 20 rounds of direct talks since they resumed negotiations in July, agreeing to keep talking until the end of April.
But the deadline is looming, and despite Israel’s release on Tuesday of a third tranche of Palestinian prisoners, there have been little signs of progress amid growing pessimism Kerry’s push will just join the long litany of failed US peace efforts.
US officials cautioned they were not expecting any breakthroughs on this trip, which comes just as Abbas threatened to take legal and diplomatic action to halt Israeli settlement building.
Speaking in Ramallah late Tuesday, Abbas said: “We will not remain patient as the settlement cancer spreads, especially in (east) Jerusalem.”
“The settlement activity that has been going on has created a lot of questions on the Palestinian side and in the international community about the intentions of the government of Israel,” the State Department official conceded, asking to remain anonymous.
“It’s both the building and the planning that creates a great deal of heartburn,” the official added, reiterating the US position that settlements are illegitimate.