Diplomacy

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Amid Palestinian Rejectionism, Kerry Announces “Basis” for Restarting Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks

by TheTower.org Staff |

After months in which Israeli officials had been calling on their Palestinian counterparts to return to negotiations without preconditions – and had been rebuffed – Secretary of State John Kerry announced a breakthrough this afternoon.

The language of the announcement – which did not set a date for talks to resume – seemed carefully chosen:

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday that Israel and the Palestinian Authority had “established a basis” for resuming formal peace talks for the first time since 2010 and hoped to convene a meeting in Washington within a week or “very soon thereafter.” Mr. Kerry said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, had made courageous decisions and he was “hopeful” that talks would resume. Mr. Kerry said that if “everything goes as expected,” senior Israeli and Palestinian negotiators would join Mr. Kerry in Washington within the next week or so to begin initial talks. They would make a further announcement at that time.

The announcement took some analysts by surprise, inasmuch as Palestinian negotiators had as late as last night demanded that Israel make a number of concessions in advance in order to restart talks. Among those were demands that the Jewish state accept Israel’s 1948 armistice lines as a basis for negotiations. Israeli officials insist that position would functionally allow the Palestinians to pocket two decades of Israeli concessions and start from scratch, destroying confidence necessary for future negotiations.

Yesterday Palestinian factions linked to Abbas explicitly rejected Kerry’s peace efforts as inadequate to secure those demands. Whether Abbas was able to overcome those objections remains unclear.

For its part the Palestinian terror group Hamas – which controls the Gaza Strip, territory that the Palestinians reserve for themselves in a future state – rejected today’s announcement and declared that “Abbas has no legitimacy to negotiate in the name of the Palestinian people on the core issues.”

[Photo: BotMultichillT / Wiki Commons]

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