JERUSALEM: The Middle East peace process lay in tatters on Wednesday after Washington admitted defeat in its efforts to secure an Israeli freeze on settlement building, the Palestinians’ condition for resuming talks.
Speaking late on Tuesday, US officials admitted top-level efforts to coax Israel into imposing new curbs on West Bank settlement construction had gone nowhere, prompting Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to declare a crisis in peace efforts but backslapping among Israeli hardliners.
Without a new freeze, the Palestinians have refused to negotiate, effectively deadlocking direct peace talks that opened on September 2 only to run aground just weeks later when building resumed in the settlements. “We have been pursuing a moratorium as a means to create conditions for a return to meaningful and sustained negotiations,” US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said in New York.
“After a considerable effort, we have concluded that this does not create a firm basis to work towards our shared goal of a framework agreement.”
Speaking in Athens, the Western-backed Palestinian leader said: “There is no doubt that there is a crisis.”
Top Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo told Voice of Palestine radio that Israeli recalcitrance that had torpedoed the US efforts.
“The policy and the efforts of the US administration failed because of the blow it received from the Israeli government.” But a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Washington’s announcement marked a welcome acknowledgement by President Barack Obama’s administration that freezing construction was not the way to achieve peace.
“We said from the outset that settlements were not the root of the conflict and that it was only a Palestinian excuse for refusing to talk,” Nir Hefetz said. Israeli and Palestinian officials are now expected to visit Washington next week for separate talks with the Americans on ways to keep the peace process alive, Crowley said.
Israeli media said US Middle East envoy George Mitchell would meet separately with Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat and his Israeli counterpart, Yitzhak Molho, in the coming days. The United States has been trying for weeks to convince Netanyahu to impose a new moratorium on settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. A 10-month freeze expired on September 26, shortly after the launch of new peace talks — the first direct ones in nearly two years.
It now appears the two sides are likely to return to some form of indirect, or “proximity” negotiations similar to those held between May and September, Crowley suggested.
“We will have further conversations on the substance with the parties, and we will continue to try to find ways to create the kind of confidence that will eventually, we hope, allow them to engage directly,” he said.
