The Israeli government announced Thursday that it was pessimistic about the French multilateral initiative to relaunch Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and called instead for direct negotiations.
“Israel adheres to the position that the best way to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct and bilateral negotiations,” the Prime Minister’s office said in a statement. “Israel is ready to start this immediately, without preconditions. Any other political initiatives distance the Palestinians from direct negotiations.”
France announced last week that it would host ministers from 20 countries at the end of May to discuss the parameters of a peace deal. But Israeli and Palestinian officials would be excluded from the conference, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said.
Ayrault indicated that discussions will follow the 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which called for an Israeli withdrawal from all territories captured from Jordan and Syria in the Six-Day War, the creation of an independent Palestinian state with a capital in eastern Jerusalem, a “just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees” in accordance with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, and the normalization of relations between Israel and Arab nations.
Netanyahu proposed direct talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas earlier this month. The PA rejected the offer on Twitter.
The Palestinian Authority has long been criticized for refusing to negotiate – or discuss how to renew negotiations – in good faith.
Abbas acknowledged for the first time last November 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.
Abbas similarly scuttled American-sponsored peace talks with Israel in 2014. 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 also reportedly rejected a peace proposal while meeting with Vice President Joe Biden last month. That offer was said to have 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.”
Experts have cautioned that current international peace efforts are not likely to be successful.
Jonathan Schanzer, director of research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, warned at a congressional hearing earlier this month that efforts by world powers to impose a two-state solution on Israel would be disastrous as they would involve Israel “[ceding] territory in the future to a state that is possibly not viable.”
Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum argued in Commentary this month that any peace efforts that failed to address the fundamental obstacle to peace — “the Palestinian refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East” — will fail. Only by insisting that Palestinians accept Israel’s right to exist as a precondition to negotiations could the United States undermine Palestinian efforts to delegitimize Israel, he wrote.
[Photo: IsraeliPM / YouTube ]