Israel’s foreign ministry said Friday that the worldwide meeting in Paris aimed at reviving the moribund diplomatic process with the Palestinians will prove to have actually pushed peace further away.
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The Paris meeting will include more than 30 officials from the Middle East Quartet of the UN, EU, Russia and the US, as well as the Arab League and other states, but will not include representatives from Israel or Palestine.
Palestinians and Israelis are not represented in the Paris talks, which aim to lay the ground for a full-fledged peace conference to be held by the end of the year.
Israel’s Prime Minister has criticized the French initiative, but the chief Palestinian peace negotiator described it as a last glimmer of hope.
Previous attempts to coax the two sides into a deal have been fruitless.
But senior Palestinian official Saeb Erakat said the Paris talks sent a “clear” message to Israel.
She insisted that the proliferation of conflicts in the region made it more urgent than ever to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
In the document, France called for “renewed worldwide engagement” and the need for a “common assessment, that the two-state solution is the only option, that it is severely threatened and needs to be preserved”.
Israel continues to build settlements in the occupied West Bank, and Palestinians have taken to low-grade attacks on Israeli security officials – usually in the form of knife attacks that often result in the attacker being shot dead by security officers.
– WYE PLANTATION: October 23, 1998: A deal signed at Wye Plantation in the U.S. calls for a gradual Israeli withdrawal from 13 percent of the land it still occupies in the West Bank, which would leave the Palestinians controlling 40 percent.
French Foreign Ministry said the goal was simply to begin a process that would bring everyone back to the table by the end of the year.
“We must seek a situation in which the countries of the region are convinced of the importance of progress in the peace process”, Sissi said during a pre-recorded interview broadcast on Egyptian news channels to mark his second anniversary as president.
Netanyahu also criticized the French Initiative, arguing that “the way to peace is via direct negotiations without preconditions between the sides”.
“Two days ago special representatives of the Quartet, who cooperate very actively and maintain permanent contact, gathered as there is a task to draw up an unbiased and comprehensive report for the UNSC on the state of affairs in the Palestinian-Israeli settlement with assessments, an analysis of the events in relations with the Israelis and the Palestinians”, he said.
Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter has praised the French-led effort to revive the Middle East peace process and has offered Swiss support towards promoting regional security.
Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East War and has been controlling it ever since despite worldwide condemnation. “Our initiative aims to give them guarantees that peace will be solid, lasting and under worldwide supervision”.
“We were expecting timelines for the negotiations”, he said, also lamenting the lack of demand to halt settlements.
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Israel claimed the process failed because the Palestinians refused to accept a United States framework document outlining the way forward, while Palestinians pointed to Israel’s ongoing settlement building and the regime’s refusal to release veteran prisoners.
