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Official PLO Twitter Feed Gets Evasive on Netanyahu’s Offer to Talk Peace

by TheTower.org Staff |

In what is likely a first in the long and protracted history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Twitter was used to reject the possibility of peace negotiations.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday to meet immediately without preconditions to discuss peace and an end to the current wave of Palestinian attacks.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry alerted the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department of the offer, which started a short back-and-forth:

Two subsequent tweets from the PLO, citing the Palestinian Authority’s lead negotiator Saeb Erekat, clarified that they were demanding preconditions to talk.

Contrary to the assertion in the last tweet, the Palestinian Authority has not, in fact, welcomed negotiations.

Last November, Abbas acknowledged for the first time on Israeli television that he had “rejected out of hand” a peace proposal offered to him in 2008 by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The terms of the peace offer were reported by The Tower’s Avi Issacharoff in 2013, when Olmert told Issacharoff that he had presented Abbas with a map illustrating his proposal during talks at the Prime Minister’s Residence.

Erekat explained Abbas’s reason for rejecting the Olmert offer in a 2009 interview with Al Jazeera:

 In November 2008… Let me finish… Olmert, who talked today about his proposal to Abu Mazen, offered the 1967 borders, but said: “We will take 6.5% of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8% from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7% will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin.” Abu Mazen too answered with defiance, saying: “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine – the June 4, 1967 borders – without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places. This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign…

Similarly, in 2014, it was Abbas who scuttled American sponsored peace talks with Israel. As Tower editor David Hazony wrote, Abbas rejected every single American point of compromise, making it “extremely difficult to avoid the conclusion that Abbas was at no point actually embarking on a process that would include significant compromise or result in a peace agreement with Israel.”

Abbas reportedly rejected a peace proposal when meeting with Vice-President Joe Biden last month. That proposal reportedly included a Palestinian capital in eastern Jerusalem and a moratorium on West Bank construction in exchange for recognizing Israel as a Jewish state and relinquishing the Palestinian “right of return.”

[Photo: Michael Maggs / Wikimedia ]

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