Washington – U.S. officials told Jewish community leaders on a private conference call Friday afternoon that they believe Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is on the verge of joining Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in accepting an invitation to resume peace talks. …
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“The sun has now set and [Abbas] is conducting what is going to be one final round of consultations and we expect a positive announcement to come quiet soon after he finishes,” said deputy special envoy David Hale, attributing delay in the Abbas announcement to the Ramadan holiday.
Hale acknowledged, however, that the details of the talks — announced to great fanfare today — have yet to be finalized.
“Within the negotiations we’ve obviously had a lot of preparatory discussions with the parties on how to structure them,and we’ll need to finalize those, so we’re not in a position now to really talk about that,” he said in response to a question.
Hale also deferred on the question of how hard the one-year timeline set by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be, describing it as a “goal” seen as “feasible” by both sides. ….
The aim of the [Sept. 1] dinner with Tony Blair, Egyptian and Jordanian leaders, and the three parties at the table, said [the NSC’s Dennis] Ross, is not to “have some high profile event – it’s a reminder that the aim of this process is to produce coexistance and reconciliation.”
“There’s clearly a trust deficit that we’re going to have to find a way to overcome,” he said, and the dinner will be “emblematic of what we’re trying to achieve.”
[The NSC’s Dan] Shapiro … suggested the U.S. would offer some of its own suggestions to solve complicated issues.
“In all previous negotiations, there has been a role for American ideas, American bridging proposal,” he said. “In the right context and when it’s appropriate we’re certainly prepared to do that.” …
i wonder how fast this SOON will be. . .
I didn’t get a phone call.
What’s the big news can anyone tell me? That Abbas has agreed to meet Bibi so that Israel can continue to give the Palestinians more land from which to prepare and carry out their terrorist attacks. One would think from reading this article that this is such good news for Israel that Abbas is going to talk to us. How crazy can one get.
The key to the success of these talks will be Netanyahu’s agreement to extend the settlement freeze indefinitely unitl a final peace is negotiated. This would seem so make sense since many of these west bank settlements will have to be returned to the Palestinians to make any deal feasible. The real question is how they will deal with jeruselam where most Isrealis would not be willing to give up any significant amounts of land as part of a peace agreement.
the road to violence as this is what all these piece talks end up with… they only want war and destruction of Israel. they want pieces of our land not peace with the jews.
The lubavitcher Rebbe ZYA said that any kind of talks is sakona nefushois ,you give a finger they take a hand….Hashem Yishmor.
Obama & the democratic party are trying to redefine themselves as pro israel before the midterm elections, they fear a backlash from the jewish voters because of what obama did to bibi a few months ago. But as the saying goes: you can fool all people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. NOVEMBER IS PAYBACK TIME!