As the deadline, at the end of April, for the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians draws to a close, the Palestinians are sounding the alarm on the fate of these negotiations.
It is worrisome for the Palestinians to see US Secretary of State John Kerry resort to the so-called “framework agreement” to enable the two sides to continue talking beyond the end of the April deadline, as he senses that the two sides are still far apart on several core issues, including a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their original homeland, Israel’s insistence on being recognised as a “Jewish state” and the deployment of Israeli forces along the Jordan River.
According to Palestinian sources, Kerry wants now to make even the “framework agreement” so flexible as to allow the two sides to enter reservations on it, in a desperate effort to make talks appear as if they are getting somewhere, when in fact they are not.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeina, recently warned against opening the door wide for Israel to enter reservations on the framework agreement just for the sake of maintaining some channel of communication between Palestinians and Israelis open.
In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Kerry said that Israelis and Palestinians may “have some objections” on the proposed framework agreement, but described this loophole “as the only way for them to politically be able to keep the negotiations moving”, which seems to have become the ultimate goal of the entire exercise.
The Palestinian side now says, and correctly so, that such negotiating tactics can only lead to failure.
Abu Rudeina warned that the “use of the word reservation bogs down the peace process and the use of this concept in the past has got the process stuck”.
Well, the intransigent position adopted by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot lead but to failure, even of the innocuous so-called interim framework agreement.
Unless the US intervention is serious and decisive, no positive outcome can be expected from any talks between Israelis and Palestinians.
