The declaration coincides with a Friday meeting of foreign ministers in Paris aimed at drumming up support for the French initiative, the main aim of which is to restart stalled talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.
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According to French diplomatic sources, the fresh peace push would centre on the 2002 Saudi Arabian-led initiative, in which Arab leaders said they would recognise the state of Israel in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied since 1967, and the creation of a Palestinian state.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rebuffed the French initiative.
U.S., European and Arab diplomats are meeting Friday in Paris for a French-led effort to revive the Mideast peace process, despite skepticism from Israel.
Eran Lerman, until recently the deputy director of the Israeli National Security Council and now a senior research associate at the BESA Center, explained to reporters in a conference call organized by The Israel Project (which publishes The Tower) that Israel was concerned about the “architecture” of the conference.
“We still don’t see any other options for peace than the two states”, she said, calling on the global community to recreate conditions for the peace process to restart.
French President Francois Hollande has said there is an “urgent” need to find a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, warning that the absence of a deal would only benefit “extremists”.
And although US Secretary of State John Kerry is attending the conference, Washington has made it clear it believes little or nothing will be achieved.
All indications in Israel seem to point to the fact that Netanyahu may not have many days in office and a new election is a possibility, a step that could cripple the objective of the Paris conference. “This border may envisage territorial exchanges, appropriate and adequate, taking into account that such approach allows to resolve the problem of Israeli settlements on the West Bank”, Bogdanov, who heads the Russian delegation at the global Middle East peace conference in Paris, said.
France has said it felt compelled to act because the opportunities for setting up a Palestinian state alongside Israel are slipping away, while the situation in the region is deteriorating.
The diplomats agreed to establish teams to work on economic and security incentives they could offer if the Israelis and Palestinians reached an agreement.
Mr Erekat said: “We are used to Netanyahu and his government’s inconsistencies, and contradictions between words and actions”.
The meeting, the first global peace accord effort in nearly 10 years, included the United States, Russia, China, major European countries and Japan, as well as Arab neighbors such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
The officials noted that three foreign ministers, from Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and Germany, did not attend the meeting.
“History will record that the conference in Paris only hardened the Palestinian position and distanced the chances for peace”, a Foreign Ministry statement said.
One French diplomatic source told AFP that without a new drive to find peace, “we risk heading towards even more violence in an global context where there is no visible American effort on the case”. The communique also highlighted the “potential for regional peace and security as envisioned by the Arab Peace Initiative”.
The United States, the traditional mediator in the conflict, has not moved the two sides towards a new peace process since talks collapsed in April 2014.
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The report Shamni worked on, entitled “A Security System for the Two-State Solution”, says its objective is to demonstrate that security measures “can provide Israelis and Palestinians with a degree of security equal or greater to that provided today by Israel’s deployment into the West Bank, and that such measures can be consistent with Palestinian needs for sovereignty and dignity”.
