Israel Stalls, Drags Out Peace Talks
Palestinian negotiators are frustrated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s team is not willing to pick up where talks with former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert left off.
Information leaked to Al-Monitor from the hush-hush Palestinian-Israeli peace talks reveal that negotiators are stuck on where they should begin. Palestinians want the talks to begin where they left off the last time substantive talks took place, during Ehud Olmert’s premiership. At those talks, Palestinian and Israeli leaders apparently made headway on some of the most difficult issues, including borders and Jerusalem. The Benjamin Netanyahu government, however, appears to reject such an idea and wants instead to start from scratch. In the eyes of the Israelis, since all issues are open for discussion, the current government is not bound by any previous commitments or understandings.
Israel’s attempts to negate all previous understandings place the entire peace talks in jeopardy and bring back to the fore the Palestinians' insistence that the talks be based on an agreed framework. The Palestinians want the talks to be based on the framework presented by US President Barack Obama in his 2012 speech to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby. Obama’s framework is that the negotiations be based on a two-state solution along the June 1967 borders with some land swaps. The Israelis rejected this request, so the talks began without a framework, which has resulted in the negotiations being stuck at ground zero.
The difficulties over where to begin also bring into question the issue of the time allotted for the current talks. It is known that whenever there are negotiations, parties to a conflict typically hold their starting positions as long as they can. The most important and genuine concessions are made, literally, at the last moment, hence the expression a "five minutes before midnight agreement."
This brings into question the wisdom of the long, nine-month period set aside for the current talks. Not only is nine months the target for completion of the talks, it has also become a condition tying down the negotiators. When the Palestinian delegation failed to obtain an Israeli settlement freeze or acceptance of the 1967 borders as the framework for the talks, the Palestinians settled on securing the release of prisoners as part of the process, to strengthen President Mahmoud Abbas’ reputation among Palestinians.
