Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is on a mission, and for the first time the Palestinian-designed political road map is forcing the international community to take notice. Palestinian negotiators are in the unusual situation of being in the driver’s seat with European and US officials running after them trying to persuade them to make changes in both substance and process. The Palestinian plan focuses on the UN Security Council and aims at producing a resolution that can put a time limit on Israel’s nearly five-decade occupation of Palestinian land.
Senior Palestinian official Nabil Shaath explained to Al-Monitor the process that led to the submission of the current proposal to the UN Security Council. “We looked at why the negotiations failed and we fixed them. One of the reasons for this failure is that the talks have always been chaperoned only by the United States, which is extremely commitment to their ally Israel. We felt it would be better if we had international monitoring to the process,” he said.
