John Kerry Brokered Agreement for Start I-P Peace Talks

17 Comments

1. 

   Oui on July 19, 2013 at 3:43 pm

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   Fatah calls on Palestinians to overthrow Hamas in wake of Morsi’s fall

   RAMALLAH, Palestine (JPost) –  Palestinian Authority leaders expressed joy over the downfall of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s regime, with some calling on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to follow suit and topple the Hamas government.

   Palestinian analysts predicted that the collapse of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt would undermine Hamas, which in the past year has been emboldened by Morsi’s rise to power.

   PA President Mahmoud Abbas was one of the first Arab leaders to congratulate the Egyptians on the ouster of Morsi. In a letter to acting President Adli Mansour, Abbas congratulated him on the appointment, expressing hope that he would fulfill the aspirations of the Egyptian people to “live in freedom, dignity and stability.”

   Abbas praised the Egyptian army and its commanders for preserving the country’s security and preventing it from slipping toward the abyss.

   • Hamas accused of involvement in a prison escape in 2011
   • Palestinians in Gaza feel the Egypt effect as smuggling tunnels close
   • Egypt plans operation against terror in Sinai
2. 

   Oui on July 19, 2013 at 4:34 pm

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   {Update1} Israel PM criticises EU funding ban

   (Al Jazeera) – The EU Guidelines make clear that, from next year, Israeli “entities” operating in the territories will not be eligible for EU grants, prizes or loans. The measure will apply to Israeli companies, universities or other bodies operating in areas occupied by Israel since the 1967 war, including the Golan Heights, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

   “The EU has made it clear that it will not recognise any changes to pre-1967 borders,
     other than those agreed by the parties to the Middle East peace process.”

   Cross-posted from my diary – EU-Israel Trade Agreement, Funding Ban W. Bank [Update].

3. 

   Oui on July 19, 2013 at 5:01 pm

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   US declines to issue rebuke of EU settlement regulations

   WASHINGTON (JPost) – The State Department declined to issue a rebuke of the European Union for its new regulations barring member nations from cooperating with Israeli organizations and businesses operating in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

   The US instead reinforced its position on settlement building in the territories.

   “The US position on settlements is clear and has not changed,” a State Department spokesman told The Jerusalem Post, referring questions on the details of the decision to European officials. “We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.”

   An expert at the Brookings Institution suggested in an interview that, given the nature of exchanges between the US and the EU, it was likely the Obama administration was given notice of the policy shift.

   B’nai B’rith International expressed “outrage” in a statement to journalists.

   “These guidelines clearly display the longstanding EU double standard and obsession with Israel to the point of outright discrimination,” president Allan J. Jacobs said.

   Obama Pressing Netanyahu as Government Split on 2-State Solution

   • EU Foreign Ministers Condemn Israeli Settlements for Threatening Two-State Solution – May 2012
   • Kerry pushes Israel to consider Arab League peace plan
   • Netanayhu Appoints Neocon Ron Dermer as Next Ambassador

   See my recent comment – Washington watch: Israel’s dysfunctional diplomacy.

   • 

     Salunga on July 19, 2013 at 8:57 pm

        That is really good news. It brings to mind this quote:  “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

        A bit of justice is refreshing. Justice is hard to find.

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       Don Durito on July 19, 2013 at 10:19 pm

       There hasn’t been a lot of good news on the justice front as of late. I’m with you – I find the good news refreshing.

4. 

   Oui on July 19, 2013 at 6:18 pm

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   Kerry at the press conference (Video: Reuters)

   (YnetNews) –  US State Secretary John Kerry announced an agreement has been reached on the resumption of peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians in a press conference in Jordan’s capital Amman, after a series of meetings in Jordan and Ramallah with Palestinian officials.

   Tzipi Livni, the minister in charge of the negotiation on the Israeli side, the prime minister’s emissary Yitzhak Molcho and Palestinian Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat are expected to meet in Washington as early as next week for the beginning of the talks.

   “We have reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming direct final status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Kerry told reporters in Jordan. “The agreement is still in the process of being formalized.”

   According to forecasts, the negotiations will open without preconditions, will last between nine months to a year, and will discuss all the core issues. In the course of negotiations, the timetable for the overtures will be decided. Though the talks will be handled at first by Livni and Erekat it is estimated that later the talks will move up to involve Netanyahu and Abbas .

   The negotiations are expected to be conducted under a shroud of secrecy, the same as the process to renew the talks was handled, the aim being to avoid public pressure and disturbances.

   Bibi’s inner circle

5. 

   Oui on July 20, 2013 at 4:20 am

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   Woman of the World

   (Vanity Fair) June 2011 – In her ninth year as America’s most admired woman, Hillary Clinton is dealing with radical change across the globe, as well as trying to transform U.S. diplomacy on the nuts-and-coffee level. But despite the secretary of state’s punishing pace–half a million miles in her Boeing 757–and the complex relationship between her and President Obama, Clinton seems clear about what she can (and can’t) accomplish

   It was four a.m. when Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, and by midmorning she was in the Oval Office conferring with President Obama. The night before, as her plane was en route from Tunis, they had agreed that the vote of the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone on Libya meant that it was now decision time on launching a third American war in the Middle East, though no one in the U.S. government dared call it that.

   …
   So only hours after landing from Tunis, she was headed back to Paris. By then it was clear that the “Arab Spring” of 2011 was creating tumult not just in the Middle East but inside the Obama administration. Not since the fall of Communism, in the late 80s, has a U.S. administration faced a chain reaction of foreign crises that seemed so much out of its control.

   At first, Hillary looked clairvoyant: in January, when the street protests were still small in Tunisia, she lectured decrepit dictatorial regimes at a conference in Qatar that “the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.” Within days, demonstrators filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a vibrant plea for greater freedom that swiftly spread to Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Libya, and eventually even Syria.

   • Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton: Israel makes its own decisions
   • Netanyahu Extending His Middle Finger to the World
   • US Foreign Policy, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood Ploy
   • 20 Years of Failed Middle-East Peace Policy

   From a recent diary – Qatar’s Al Jazeera has made a fan of Hillary Clinton, a powerful ally.

6. 

   Oui on July 20, 2013 at 6:00 am

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   European Union Boycotts Israeli Colonies on the Palestinian West Bank

   (Informed Comment) – The Israeli government’s de facto annexation and colonization of the Palestinian West Bank is illegal in international law. United Nations members cannot acquire territory by warfare according to the UN Charter (it doesn’t matter from whom they acquire the territory). The UN Charter was written by people who disapproved of the behavior of the aggressors in World War II, which often involved acquiring territory of unrelated people by falling on them militarily, as Israel did on Gaza and the West Bank in 1967. Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank has never been formally recognized by any country in the world and has been repeatedly condemned by the world’s major states and by the United Nations Security Council.

   Israel has managed to thumb its nose at the world community and to go on stealing Palestinian land, water and other resources on a vast scale just because none of its critics was willing to do anything practical to stand in the way of this colonial annexation and erection of an Apartheid state. The United States routinely vetoes UNSC resolutions condemning Israeli theft of Palestinian land and erection of Israeli colonies on it, as well as the latticework of checkpoints and Israeli-only highways that have carved up the West Bank and made Palestinians’ lives miserable. The Israelis are perfectly nice people, but all Occupation regimes distort and degrade the character of the Occupiers.

   EU: No intention to boycott settlement products

   At long last, however, the  European Union is putting its collective foot down. It is insisting that Israeli institutions and companies based in the Palestinian West Bank be excluded from any Israeli participation in a program of the European Union. The  EU guidelines [pdf] are here.

   • Prominent U.K. jurist says boycott of West Bank settlement products is legal
   • Jimmy Carter calls on EU to label settlement goods
7. 

   shergald on July 20, 2013 at 10:44 am

   So, I’m not the only cynic around afterall.

   Was I wrong yesterday when I claimed that John Kerry’s peace process mission was a failure?  Just he because Kerry wrangled a last minute agreement from Israel and the Palestinians to come to Washington to talk about talking – over six months no less – doesn’t place the peace process in Kerry’s win column.  It also doesn’t forfeit my claim that both Kerry and President Obama have become the latest of America’s lame ducks in the Middle East.

   I hope I’m wrong.  I doubt it.

   Why did Israel agree to talks?  Some believe that the drumbeat commentary of the coming end of the Two State option forced Israel’s hand.  Others think that the new European Union guidelines separating Israel and its occupation, the BDS movement and the growing international sense that Israel had gone too far was the catalyst.  In other words, Israel had to do something.  Why not look ready for peace and at the same time exhaust yet another American administration by agreeing to talk – about talking.  

   Marc H. Ellis…Mondoweiss

   http://mondoweiss.net/2013/07/talking-about-talking.html

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     Oui on July 20, 2013 at 12:14 pm

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     Ellis is wrong and wrote this likely before Kerry’s last visit to Ramallah. The first round of talks will be in Washington in a week more or less, where Kerry will participate. There will be no press statements from parties, only Kerry will communicate to the press as the negotiators are working on the final issues/wording of the agreement. In the meantime there will be no statements. It will be a long haul, but you won’t get there if you don’t start. On both sides the obstacles are immense from political foes, read those comments and you will be pessimistic. Because Kerry put his job on the line, he got this preliminary “success.” Yes, I’m optimistic and I hope all the pressure from Europe will help. Just as I have written these past years, The Dutch Likud minister Uri Rosenthal did plenty of harm, just as the likes of Geert Wilders and his US compatriots Daniel Pipes & Co.

     Also from Mondoweiss …

     A selection of views on Kerry’s initiative (`By George he did it!’ `Sovereignty over slivers’)

     Israeli politician/centrist/Justice Minister Tzipi Livni on Facebook:

     “It was months of skepticism and cynicism. But now, four years of political deadlock are about to end. On occasion I also know that the negotiations will be complicated and not easy. But I believe with all my heart it’s the right thing for our future, for our security, economy and values of Israel. Get an estimate for the Prime Minister who took decisions that represent the interests of Israel. And the determination of the self-evident of the American Secretary of State led to the ג׳ון coming, and we, in the negotiations. In that room we will maintain the national and the security interests of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state — to that I vouch.”

     I’m aware three years ago the direct talks lasted just 3 days. However, Obama was in a disadvantage and had to recover lost ground from which he hopes more than talks will be the result during his 2nd administration. It’s not the boycotts or BSD movement that will push both parties forward. The events on the ground in Egypt and Syria play a major role. The change of leadership in Egypt is part of the opening to succeed. Watch!

     Read the Jerusalem Post and especially the readers comments: Analysis: Kerry’s Mideast breakthrough raises the stakes.

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       shergald on July 20, 2013 at 1:12 pm

       Well, we can dream, can’t we. The ultra-right wing Israeli Kenesset has already garnered enough votes from members, way more than is necessary, for a “no state” conclusion. The rap is the dnager of more terrorism from the Palestinians, the “security” card.

       But the end-all statement on these negotiations was uttered from Kerry himself: “last chance” for the Palestinians. Is there any doubt that the Palestinians will be blamed again for the demise of Palestine?

       Sorry Oui, but we will just have to disagree on the outcome. We have been here before, watching the rerun of an old movie.

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     Oui on July 20, 2013 at 12:20 pm

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     My comment took a bit longer as I had to wipe away a tear … A Rebel Dies at 92

     May she be as critical in heaven as she was here on earth. God bless her soul. RIP Helen Thomas.

8. 

   Oui on July 20, 2013 at 2:07 pm

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   It’s a good sign State Dep’t officials in Washington DC complain they are left in the dark about what the Kerry team is up to in the Middle-East! That’s diplomatic secrecy I can support.

   Former settler leader Dayan: Releasing Palestinian prisoners wrong morally and politically

   (JPost) – The announcement that Israel has agreed to release Palestinian prisoners as a gesture for the resumption of peace talks is a terrible mistake, both morally and politically, former leader of the settler umbrella organization Dani Dayan said Saturday.

   Dayan, who stepped down after five years as head of the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip in January, told Israel Radio that it now must be determined “what else Israel agreed to give up to please Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas].

   Dayan called on Likud and Bayit Yehudi MKs to demand that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu disclose the details of the concessions he made in order to restart negotiations.

   Commenting on the announcement, Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon on Saturday stated: “We must learn from our past mistakes and not free terrorists with blood on their hands, neither as a gesture nor as a reward.”

   Addressing the resumption of the peace process and the hotly debated return to the Green Line, Danon said that we must not repeat the “injustice of the disengagement [in Gaza] by returning to the ’67 borders.”

    « click

   Palestinian factions see resumption of peace talks as ‘political suicide’

   (JPost) – Several Palestinian groups criticized the Palestinian Authority for agreeing to resume peace talks with Israel, while PLO and Fatah officials said they knew nothing about what US Secretary of State John Kerry had offered the PA leadership to bring it back to the negotiating table.

   Abbas’s spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudaineh, announced late Friday that Chief PLO Negotiator Saeb Erekat would soon head to Washington for talks with an Israeli representative under the auspices of Kerry. Abu Rudaineh said that “as a result of meetings and discussions between Kerry and Abbas over the past few days, progress has been achieved, paving the way for agreement on the principles that allow for the resumption of the negotiations (with Israel).”

   Abu Rudaineh did not say how the progress was achieved. However, he pointed out that “certain details still require finding a solution for them.” Nabil Amr, a senior Fatah official and former PA minister, said the way the PA leadership dealt with the issue of resuming negotiating with Israel was “frustrating.”

   Netanyahu prisoner release before talks begin in Washington .. oops was it promised before in July 2012.

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     shergald on July 20, 2013 at 2:55 pm

     Here’s one make or break issue, among many, that can and will lead to a dead end for the talks. And it is not the incessant building of settlements (the colonzation, land theft), which will continue as they speak.

     Press Release July 20, 2013

     Gush Shalom: negotiations stand or fall on the 1967 borders issue.

     “The negotiations due to open in Washington, after all the efforts of Secretary of State Kerry, will stand or fall primarily with one issue: an agreement that the Green Line, the internationally recognized borders of Israel as they were on June 4, 1967, will be the basis for the permanent border between the existing State of Israel and the State of Palestine which will come into existence at its side” says Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc.

     “If this is agreed on, we have a breakthrough to a peace agreement with the Palestinians and with the entire Arab world. It then would be possible to hold detailed negotiations of demarking the precise boundary line and define small, reciprocal swaps of territory. Also other issues such as  Jerusalem and refugees, highly emotional for both sides, can be solved  once it is defined where the two parties stand on the ground and what will be the border between the two states.

     On the other hand, if there no agreement on the 1967 borders as the basis for an agreement – and clearly the Government of Israel in its current composition is neither willing not able to provide such an agreement – then negotiations are foredoomed to failure. In that case, the Washington talks will be remembered as a passing episode, followed by escalating violence on the ground and an increasing international isolation for Israel. In such a case, decision makers cannot disclaim responsibility.

     Adam Keller, Gush Shalom

     There are 500,000 Israelis living beyond the green line, all over the West Bank, in large cities like Ariel, and hundreds of smaller towns and villages.

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       Oui on July 20, 2013 at 4:15 pm

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       Appears we are already negotiating the small land swaps here @BooMan …  🙂

       Both sides needed to compromise in order to start the peace talks, from the fact the parties are scheduled to meet in Washington, a breakthrough has been reached. It’s either negotiate or the E1 block of settlements will forever split the West Bank in half, foregoing a Palestinian state and enduring enmity between Jews and the Arab nations. Part of the ongoing discussion between parties was the ME security question and the revolt in Egypt and sectarian war in Syria.

       Arab states: Flexible on 1967 lines in Kerry parley

       (JPost) April 30, 2013 – Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, made the comment after he and a group of Arab officials met US Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss how to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace.

       Speaking on behalf of an Arab League delegation, Sheikh Hamad appeared to make a concession to Israel by explicitly raising the possibility of land swaps, although it has long been assumed that these would be part of any peace agreement.

       Justice Minister Tzipi Livni referred to al-Thani’s comments as “very positive news” in an interview with Army Radio on Tuesday morning.

       She expressed hope that his comments would help get the Palestinians to return to negotiations and send a message to the Israeli public that an agreement with the Palestinians would lead to normalization of ties with the wider Arab world.

       Netanyahu worried Kerry drifting toward Arab League stance on two-state solution – May 2013

       • Kerry to meet Arab League officials on Israeli-Palestinian peace – July 16, 2013
       • Jordan King Abdullah renews support for Egypt in Cairo meeting with Mansour
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         shergald on July 20, 2013 at 5:45 pm

         The Arab League has been offerring its peace plan since 2002, with promises of peace and normalized relations with Arab nations, but were flipped off then, and many times since. What has changed? The EU-Ashton prohibition on accepting West Bank products from Israeli settlements? Israel’s solution: sell more to the US, Canada, and the other English speaking pro-Israel nations like Australia.

         Until the Israel nation per se is hit hard with EU sanctions, these minor boycotts are trivial, and will not stop the continuing colonization of Palestine. The building of settlements continues while talks begin, and that, in my opinion, is the only key to Israeli seriousness and readiness to accept a two-state solution. But it will never happen.

9. 

   Oui on July 20, 2013 at 11:58 pm

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   Plenty of anger on Israeli side, perhaps Kerry did accomplish a breakthrough! Did Netanyahu compromise too much?

   Bennett: Bayit Yehudi opposition to ’67 lines paid off

   (JPost) – Likud Beytenu and Bayit Yehudi politicians warned against releasing prisoners and freezing settlement construction Saturday night, with most waiting until after Shabbat to respond to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s Friday-night announcement that peace talks will be renewed.

   Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett said his party’s standing up for its principles – that it will not sit in a government that will negotiate on pre-’67 lines – proved itself.

   “As negotiations open, we will make sure to continue regular life and construction in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem.”

   According to Bennett, “history taught us that construction brings life and evacuating settlements brings terror.”

   …
   The Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip plan to hold an emergency meeting late Sunday afternoon to formulate a response to the renewed talks.

   Former council head Danny Dayan expressed doubts that any actual negotiations will take place, tweeting: “My impression is there is no agreement to resume substantive talks. Only to face-save Kerry. Talks about the talks will continue in [Washington], DC.”

   He added his advice to Likud Beytenu and Bayit Yehudi members: “Your working assumption [is] Israel gave up on all issues. Let the prime minister prove you wrong.”

   Steinitz: Israel to free Palestinian prisoners in peace talks renewal

   • Netanyahu: Resumption of peace process is a vital strategic interest for Israel