Representatives from almost 30 countries were meeting in Paris on Friday to begin talks on pursuing peace in the Middle East – without the Israelis and Palestinians.
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The French-led initiative, aimed at helping to move beyond the current stalemate, will include ministers and delegates from the so-called Middle East Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations), and the Arab League.
However, it failed to say anything about ongoing Palestinian terror and incitement, the consistent refusal to recognize Israel as the Jewish state, or the Palestinians’ unilateral diplomatic activities in breach of the Oslo Accords.
Neither Israel nor the Palestinians were invited to take part in Friday’s meeting.
“France wanted to take this political initiative because the situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories is worsening due to the lack of prospects for negotiations”, the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “The French initiative sadly provides a multi lateral framework which the Palestinian leadership sees as an imposed solution on Israel and an escape path from making those hard decisions”. Instead, in their seething anger at their colleagues or opponents, they have been engaging in abusive, emotional, inaccurate and baseless language that will prove a gift to Israel-bashers, pro-BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) anti-Semites, Israel-hating journalists and other Jew-hating propagandists.
Palestinians fear that Israeli settlements could deny them a viable state. Israel, which has occupied East Jerusalem since the 1967 Middle East war, regards the whole of the city as its indivisible capital, though this is not recognised by the global community.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has angrily denounced the French initiative as unwelcome global meddling and said that the only way to proceed is to hold direct bilateral talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, without preconditions.
Washington’s response to the French effort has been tepid, with Secretary of State John Kerry agreeing to attend simply to listen to ideas proposed by France and others.
The United States will not bring any specific proposals at a Paris conference meant to set out a framework for fresh negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians nor has it decided what, if any role, it may play in the French effort, a senior State Department official said on Thursday.
Israel has rejected the meeting and called for direct negotiations.
Just this week, the once-moribund Arab Peace Initiative is back in the game after years on the sidelines.
In a column in the French daily Le Monde on Thursday, Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said the old method of bilateral talks had failed and that it was time to move to a ” multilateral framework” that would allow the worldwide community to impose global law in the region.
“The Palestinians see the end game, 10 years from now”, Ghaith al-Omari, a former member of the Palestinian negotiating team, said at a May 31 CNAS/Israel Policy Forum conference on security measures for advancing a two-state solution.
On Monday, following the swearing-in of hawkish lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman as Defense Minister, he and Netanyahu both said they support the two-state solution, with Lieberman lauding a speech recently given by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on the need to restart talks with the involvement of Arab states, including Egypt, based on the 2002 Saudi Arabia peace proposal.
Some analysts saw Netanyahu’s comments as a means of fending off his global critics and perhaps scuttling the French initiative by proposing an alternative.
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The core issues of the conflict will not be discussed during Friday’s conference.
