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| Arab support: Egypt's Hosni Mubarak (r.) met Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (c.) and Foreign Minister Tzipi
Livni (l.). Sebastian Scheiner/AP |
Momentum builds for Mideast peace summit
But Israelis, Palestinians have no blueprint yet for talks to begin Tuesday.
from the November 21, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Palestinians have indicated that they want Arab states there, but only if Israel is willing to put substantial issues on the table. Many here say they doubt Israel will, and its resistance to doing so is diminishing expectations.
"The Israelis are really not in a rush to settle the core issues, and the Palestinians are too weak to do so," says Bassam Zubeidy, a political scientist at Birzeit University outside Ramallah.
The promise of having a clear and concrete working paper to launch the Annapolis conference continues to hang in doubt, sources on both sides indicated.
"There's been progress but that doesn't mean that there will be a joint statement," says Miri Eisin, Olmert's spokeswoman. Returning from the meetings in Egypt, she acknowledges that getting to a declaration has proved difficult. What each side wants from the documents varies wildly.
"Israel wants to go forward but not at any price," Ms. Eisin says. "If these were simple issues that could be solved just like that, they wouldn't have been our sticking points for years and years."
She says that too much emphasis is being put on whether Israeli and Palestinian negotiations can get to a substantive joint statement ahead of next week's meeting.
"Annapolis is the opening point for a discussion on the core issues," she says. "It's not supposed to give a solution to the core issues; it's supposed to frame them."
Palestinians, however, hold a different view. President Mahmoud Abbas cannot, in his weakened position, agree to a conference that will seem mostly like a photo opportunity, many Palestinians say.
Palestinian Information Minister Riad al-Maliki said that Palestinians would go to Annapolis with the expectation that Israel would "open the closed [Palestinian] institutions in Jerusalem, remove settlement outposts and institute a total freeze on the settlement activities, releasing the prisoners and removing the checkpoints," according to the Al-Ayyam newspaper.
"I don't know if we can finalize the document," senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Israel's Army Radio after talks late Monday night between the Israeli and Palestinian teams.
Olmert, meanwhile, has taken measured steps in the direction. He said Monday that Israel would free 441 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails as a confidence-building measure in support of President Abbas.
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