JERUSALEM: US President Barack Obama’s peace envoy sought Thursday an “early relaunch” of Israeli-Palestinian talks but Israel’s foreign minister said Washington’s goal of comprehensive peace was an illusion.
“We are determined, persevering, and we recognize the complexities and the difficulties,” George Mitchell told reporters before talks with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Tel Aviv. “We remain committed and confident that ultimately the goal of comprehensive peace will be achieved.” Resuming talks suspended 10 months ago was essential for a comprehensive regional treaty involving Israel and neighbors that include Syria and Lebanon. Obama believes “there is no alternative” if the region wants peace, Mitchell said.
Desultory peace talks were derailed by the Gaza war. Obama has made their resumption a priority. He invested more political capital last month by arranging a meeting of the Israeli and Palestinian leaders in New York, but with scant results.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced before meeting Mitchell earlier Thursday that he would tell the envoy there was no chance of a peace deal for many years.
“There are many conflicts in the world that haven’t reached a comprehensive solution and people learned to live with it,” Lieberman, a hawk in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-leaning coalition government, told Israel Radio.
“Whoever says that it’s possible to reach in the coming years a comprehensive agreement ... simply doesn’t understand the reality,” Lieberman said. “He’s spreading illusions and in the end brings disappointment.”
But the center-left Barak took a different tack, telling Mitchell that “the time had come to move determinately forward” and that comprehensive peace in the Middle East was not a “zero-sum game” but a “win-win” situation for all parties.
US officials said Mitchell, who meets Abbas and Netanyahu on Friday, was back with a sense of urgency but no expectation of a breakthrough.
Since his appointment in January, Mitchell has visited Israel and the West Bank nine times. The missions have been stymied by Netanyahu’s refusal to halt settlement construction and by Arab states’ reluctance to make any concessions.
The Palestinians say Mitchell must realize that Lieberman has made it clear why “there will be no relaunch of negotiations any time soon,” Nabil Abu Rudainah, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, told Reuters from Rome, where Abbas was on an official visit.
“We need to hear a response to this statement, from Mitchell and from the American administration who are making efforts to salvage the peace process while faced with an Israeli government which destroys all those American efforts,” Abu Rudainah added.
King Abdallah of Jordan, whose country has made peace with Israel and who plays an important role in advancing the peace process with the Palestinians, was quoted Thursday as saying in an interview “we are sliding back into the darkness.”
