FILE - In this Monday, Sept. 7, 2009 file photo, an Israeli flag is seen in front of the West Bank Jewish settlement of Maaleh Adumim, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Nine months of U.S.-driven diplomacy have left Israelis and Palestinians less hopeful than ever about a comprehensive peace agreement to end their century of conflict. Although a formula may yet be found to somehow prolong the talks past an end-of-April deadline, they are on the brink of collapse and the search is already on for new ideas. (AP Photo)
JERUSALEM, April 25 (Reuters): Israel on Thursday suspended U.S.-sponsored peace talks with the Palestinians in response to President Mahmoud Abbas’s unexpected unity pact with the rival Islamist Hamas group.
The negotiations had appeared to be heading nowhere even before Wednesday’s reconciliation agreement between the Palestinian groups plunged them deeper into crisis. The United States had been struggling to extend the talks beyond an original April 29 deadline for a peace accord.
“The government of Israel will not hold negotiations with a Palestinian government that is backed by Hamas, a terror organisation that calls for Israel’s destruction,” an official statement said after a six-hour meeting of the security cabinet.
Asked to clarify whether that meant the talks were now frozen or would be called off only after a unity government was formed, a senior Israeli official said: “They are currently suspended.”
In Washington, a U.S. official said the United States would have to reconsider its assistance to Abbas’s aid-dependent Palestinian Authority if the Western-backed leader and Hamas formed a government. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke by telephone with Abbas on Thursday and expressed his disappointment at the reconciliation announcement.
Kerry stressed that any Palestinian government must abide by the principles of nonviolence, recognition of the state of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
Kerry, who has shuttled repeatedly to the Middle East to push peace efforts, said he was not giving up hope. “There’s always a way forward, but the leaders have to make the compromises necessary to do that,” he told reporters. “We will never give up our hope or our commitment for the possibilities of peace. We believe it is the only way to go. But right now, obviously, it’s at a very difficult point and the leaders themselves have to make decisions. It’s up to them.”
U.N. Middle East envoy Robert Serry offered support for the Palestinian agreement after meeting Abbas on Thursday, saying in a statement it was “the only way to reunite the West Bank and Gaza under one legitimate Palestinian Authority”. The deal envisions a unity government within five weeks and elections six months later. Palestinian divisions widened after Hamas, which won the last general ballot in 2006, seized the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to Abbas in 2007.
‘DOOR WAS NOT CLOSED’
In an interview with MSNBC after the security cabinet meeting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to leave open a window for future talks if Abbas reversed course or reconciliation with Hamas, seen by the West as a terrorist group, fell through.
“I hope (Abbas) changes his mind,” Netanyahu said. “I will be there in the future if we have a partner that is committed to peace. Right now we have a partner that has just joined another partner committed to our destruction. No-go.” Israeli chief negotiator Tzipi Livni said she hoped a way could be found to return to talks. “The door was not closed today,” she told Israel’s Channel 2 television.
Wasel Abu Yousef, a top Palestine Liberation Organization official, rejected what he called “Israeli and American threats” and said a unity government would be made up of technocrats. But Netanyahu dismissed any notion that Hamas would not be the real power behind the bureaucrats.
The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, championed by Kerry and aimed at ending decades of conflict and creating a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, began in July amid strong public scepticism in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The two sides were also at odds over Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, activity most countries deem illegal in areas captured in the 1967 Middle East war, and over Abbas’s refusal to accept Netanyahu’s demand he recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
For Netanyahu, Abbas’s approach to Hamas offered an opportunity to withdraw from the negotiations with a reduced risk of a rift with the United States, Israel’s main ally, which also refuses to deal with the Islamist militant group. A suspension of the talks, while casting blame on the Palestinian reconciliation venture, is also likely to calm far-right allies in Netanyahu’s governing coalition who oppose the creation of a Palestinian state and territorial compromise.
For Abbas, whose official mandate as president expired five years ago, an alliance with Hamas leading to a new election potentially strengthening his political legitimacy could outweigh the prospect of any international backlash.
Palestinians have also been angered by Israel’s announcement during the negotiations of thousands of new settler housing units and what they say was its failure to tackle substantive issues such as the borders of a future state.
SANCTIONS
The next immediate steps stemming from the collapse of the talks seemed likely to be Israeli sanctions against the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank.
“The sanctions will be measured. We will not cause the Palestinian Authority to collapse,” Livni said on television. Palestinian leaders have already made clear they would seek to further their bid for nationhood via unilateral moves to join various international bodies and United Nations agencies. The biggest threat for Israel could come in the shape of the International Criminal Court, with the Palestinians confident they could prosecute Israel there for alleged war crimes tied to the occupation of lands seized in 1967.
“Israel will respond to unilateral Palestinian action with a series of measures,” said the Israeli statement issued after the security cabinet meeting, without going into detail. The talks had moved close to a breakdown this month when Israel refused to carry out the last of four waves of prisoner releases, demanding that Palestinians first commit to negotiating after the April deadline.
Abbas responded by signing 15 international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war and occupations. Israel condemned the move as a unilateral step towards statehood. Asked whether the reconciliation with Hamas would incur promised U.S. sanctions, PLO Deputy Secretary Yasser Abed Rabo told Palestinian radio it was too soon to penalise a government that had yet to be formed. “There’s no need for the Americans to get ahead of themselves over this. What happened in Gaza in the last two days is just a first step which we welcome and want to reinforce,” he said. “But this step shouldn’t be exaggerated, that an agreement for reconciliation has been completely reached... We need to watch the behaviour of Hamas on many details during the coming days and weeks on forming a government and other things.”
US unwilling to give up peace process yet
WASHINGTON, April 25 (AP): The suspension of peace talks between Israel and Palestinians delivered the harshest blow yet to Secretary of State John Kerry’s ambitious, if perhaps quixotic, hope of ending the decades-long impasse at the cost of focusing on other crises around the world. But Kerry refused to accept defeat, saying “we will never give up our hope or our commitment for the possibilities” of Mideast peace.
Kerry sought on Thursday to portray the latest setback with as much optimism as the dismal development would allow. “There is always a way forward,” he told reporters at the State Department, just a few hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv bluntly said the peace process had taken “a giant leap backward.”
Even diplomats and experts sympathetic to Kerry’s desire to soldier on with the talks declared the Mideast peace process on life support. Others, impatient with what they described as the Obama administration’s rudderless foreign policy, said the U.S. needed to move on and refocus on other pressing priorities.
Kerry acknowledged the bleakness of the situation, and said Israeli and Palestinian leaders needed to be willing to make compromises to keep the nine months of negotiations alive beyond an April 29 deadline. “We may see a way forward, but if they’re not willing to make the compromises necessary, it becomes very elusive,” he said.
Kerry has struggled to hold together the talks after a series of tit-for-tat diplomatic maneuvers between the two sides over the last month that have eroded any trust or progress built since last summer. The worst blow came Thursday when Israel’s security cabinet agreed to shelve the negotiations as the result of a new deal struck by the Palestinian Authority to create a reconciliation government with the militant group Hamas.
Former U.S. diplomat and Mideast peace negotiator Dennis Ross said the Obama administration should wait to see whether Hamas and Fatah are able to form an interim government within five weeks, as they have pledged. If the cannot, Ross said, the process might yet survive.
Until then, “I don’t think you can say for sure that this is over with,” said Ross, who helped cobble together talks between Netanyahu and Abbas at the White House in 2010 and served as President Bill Clinton’s Mideast adviser. “It’s fair to say it’s on life support. I wouldn’t say this thing is done and can’t be resurrected.”
Time is not on Kerry’s side, nor has it been throughout the negotiations.