If the Haaretz headline is right (which I by no means concede) and the U.S. claim that the PA is about to return to direct peace negotiations, and that the Quartet will issue a statement saying that 1967 borders are the basis for such a negotiation–are all correct…then how does that square with Israel’s virtual denial of the upcoming Quartet statement:
“Israel is not willing to agree to any preconditions from the back door via a Quartet announcement that will serve as a basis for the negotiations,” a senior official in Jerusalem said.
If you add to this Bibi Netanyahu’s recent explicit denial that 1967 borders are an acceptable precondition for Israel as covered here, how is there any basis to conduct this negotiation? How can it succeed? How can it end in anything but failure? Do Barack Obama and George Mitchell know something we don’t know??
To be honest, I’m fairly certain that both Netanyahu and Abbas are fully aware that the negotiations are bound to fail. Netanyahu and his coalition partners would never agree to anything remotely resembling a viable, sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital and some equitable land swaps. This is what ignorant newspaper columnists here and elsewhere naively assume to be the consensus of all parties.
Likud-led Israel will not agree to it. The Palestinians will not agree to anything less (especially considering the huge compromises expected of them regarding the refugees), thus failure is certain. The only thing yet undecided is who’ll get the blame for this failure.
By continually blathering about his openness to direct negotiations without preconditions – sounds very nice to stupid faux-liberals – Netanyahu tried to pin the blame on Abbas. Either Abbas would refuse to enter pointless negotiations, and automatically get the blame. Or he would fail to agree to Israel’s terms – experience shows that in such cases it is also the Palestinian side who is held responsible.
What Abbas did by moving the quartet to issue this statement was just to get ahead of Bibi in the blame game. If the international community makes clear what the goal of the process is, it will be easy to measure Israel’s inevitable claims of ‘generous offers’ against this yardstick.
Since Bibi apparently failed to manipulate the quartet into abandoning the Palestinians, he now does the next best thing: Cover his ears and scream ‘LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.’
Abbas has no right to negotiate for anyone, let alone the Palestinians in the diaspora and the refugee camps, and of course in the Gaza strip. The negotiations are a dog and pony show for the west and for the Arab states, nothing more. Netanyahu and his predecessors showed their lack of good faith many times, by continuing to steal land during “peace negotiations.”