26 Sep 2010

Middle East talks hinge on settlement deadline

A freeze on new construction of Israeli settlements in occupied West Bank expires on today, and if it is not extended Middle East peace talks which began less than a month ago, could be put in doubt.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said he will walk out of direct negotiations with Israel unless the partial halt to building remains in place. Palestinians view Israel’s settlements as an obstacle to statehood.

President Barack Obama has urged Israel to continue the freeze, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose coalition is packed with pro-settler parties, has offered only to limit the scope of renewed building rather than order a moratorium extension.

Israeli and Palestinian officials met US diplomats in New York yesterday to try to find a solution and to prevent the negotiations, which began on on 2 September, from falling at the first hurdle.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, who held talks over the past several days in New York on the issue, said there was a better than even chance the peace negotiations would continue even without a moratorium.

He said in a BBC interview: “I think that the chance of achieving a mutually agreed understanding about moratorium is 50-50. I think that the chances of having a peace process is much higher.”

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Washington was “doing everything we can to keep the parties in the direct talks”.

US special envoy on the Middle East, George Mitchell, met Abbas for 30 minutes on Saturday.

The freeze expires at midnight tonight, but some of Netanyahu’s allies, including members of his own Likud party, are planning to mark the end of the moratorium earlier, by holding a cornerstone-laying ceremony for new homes in the remote Revava settlement in the northern West Bank at sundown on Sunday.

More than 430,000 Jews live in well over 100 settlements established across the West Bank and East Jerusalem on land that Israel captured from Jordan in a 1967 Middle East war.

Internationally the settlements are illegal, although Israel disputes this. Palestinians say they will make it impossible for them to create a viable state and the issue is one of the core problems standing in the way of any peace deal.

Abbas holds sway only in the West Bank, having lost control of the Gaza Strip in internal Palestinian fighting in 2007 to Hamas Islamists who oppose his peace efforts with Israel.

Israeli leaders have said many of the big settlement blocs will inevitably remain part of Israel and have suggested swapping land with the Palestinians to compensate for the lost territory.

Netanyahu says no other Israeli leader has been forced to suspend building work while entering peace negotiations and argues that the talks should continue without preconditions.

There were very low expectations attached to these latest efforts to end the decades-old conflict, but a failure to find a compromise over the freeze before even hitting core issues, such as the future of the settlements and the status of Palestinian refugees, could sink the peace process for years.