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"Joe Biden and George Mitchell arrive to kick-start Israeli-Palestinian talks" by Rory McCarthy
From time to time, the
Palestine Center distributes
articles it believes will enhance understanding
of the Palestinian political
reality. The following article by Rory McCarthy
was published in
The
Guardian
on 7 March 2010. To view
this article online, please go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/07/joe-biden-israel-palestinian-talks.
"Joe Biden and George Mitchell arrive to
kick-start Israeli-Palestinian talks"
By
Rory
McCarthy
The US vice-president,
Joe Biden, is due in Israel tomorrow for an
American diplomatic initiative to start
indirect negotiations between Israel and the
Palestinians.
The new round of so-called
"proximity talks" could be announced as early
as tomorrow, but there is scepticism on both
sides about the chance of any agreement. George
Mitchell, the US special envoy to the Middle
East, will shuttle between Israeli and
Palestinian leaders for four months hoping to
find common ground. Although the talks are
low-key, they mark the first return to a peace
process since Israel's war in Gaza more than a
year ago.
Mitchell flew into Israel on
Saturday night and met with Ehud Barak, the
Israeli defence minister, for 90 minutes. He
saw Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime
minister, today and will meet Palestinian
president Mahmoud Abbas
tomorrow.
Mitchell's team will handle
the talks, while Biden's visit is reportedly
focused on trying to win Israeli support for
the US administration's policy on Iran and on
discouraging Israel from any military action
against the Iranian regime over its nuclear
ambitions.
Abbas won the support of the
Arab League and today the executive committee
of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to go
ahead with the talks. Yet they represent a
partial climbdown for the Palestinian leader,
who for a year has insisted there will be no
talks with Israel without a full halt to the
construction of Jewish settlements on occupied
Palestinian territory. However, construction
continues, with Israel offering only a limited,
temporary halt that expires in a few
months.
In a speech on Saturday in
Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, Abbas
warned the peace process had "almost reached a
dead end. The Israeli government continues to
procrastinate to gain time and strengthen its
control of the occupied territories to prevent
any realistic possibility of establishing an
independent, viable … state of Palestine," he
said.
The Palestinian leadership wants
an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank,
with a capital in East Jerusalem. However,
Netanyahu says he will not give up East
Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967
war, occupied and later annexed ‑ a move
not recognised by the international community.
He also insists on holding on to large Jewish
settlement blocs in the West Bank and says
Israel must maintain a key presence in the
Jordan valley, along the border with
Jordan.
Some Israeli commentators were
doubtful about the new diplomacy and said the
gap between Israeli and Palestinian leaders was
too wide to bridge. "If the talks are held in
the planned indirect format, they are not going
to lead anywhere," wrote Shimon Shiffer, a
columnist in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.
"They are going to lead neither to increased
trust between the leaders nor to final status
arrangement talks in the near
future."
The diplomacy comes at a time
of heightened tension. There have been several
days of clashes between Palestinians and
Israeli police at the Haram al-Sharif, or the
Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Old City. There
has been criticism of an Israeli announcement
about more houses planned inside East Jerusalem
settlements and on Friday a 14-year-old
Palestinian boy was critically injured when he
was shot in the head with an Israeli
rubber-coated bullet during a demonstration in
Nabi Saleh, in the West Bank, against Israeli
confiscation of village land.
In
Jerusalem on Saturday night, more than 2,000
Israelis and Palestinians held a protest
against the eviction of Palestinian refugees
and the growing presence of rightwing Jewish
settlers.
The
views
expressed in this article are those of the
author and do not necessarily
reflect
those of The Jerusalem Fund.
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