The diplomatic Quartet was to meet Israeli and Palestinian leaders yesterday to take stock of the Middle East peace process with no sign that a deal will be reached by year’s end.
The gathering in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh comes a year after the peace process was relaunched at a US-sponsored conference after a near seven-year break.
Outgoing US President George W. Bush was hoping to see a deal emerge before he leaves office in January but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made it clear there is no breakthrough in sight.
Political turmoil in Israel which has led to an early election in Israel and a lingering feud between rival Palestinian factions has also hampered efforts to seal a long-elusive deal.
Last November in the US city of Annapolis, Israel and the Palestinians revived negotiations toward resolving core problems like the status of Jerusalem, the borders of a future Palestinian state and refugees.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas will report to the representatives of the Quartet — the US, the EU, Russia and the UN — on their slow-moving efforts.
Rice has tacitly admitted that Israel and the Palestinians are unlikely to reach a peace deal by the time Bush’s mandate ends on Jan. 20.
“The distance to peace has been narrowed although peace has not been achieved,” she said after meeting Abbas on Friday during her 19th visit to the Middle East in two years.
In the absence of a full accord, Rice is pushing the two sides to define the outlines of a deal before she hands over the thorny Middle East dossier to the administration of president-elect Barack Obama.
“One of the things we must do is that we must show ... that Annapolis has laid the foundation for the establishment of the state of Palestine,” she said.
Peace talks have been complicated by the ongoing feud between the Islamist Hamas, which seized control of the Gaza Strip last year, and Abbas’s Fatah party, which has held on to the West Bank.
The peace process has been also clouded by the resignation of Israel’s scandal-plagued Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that led to the scheduling of snap elections for February.
Israeli opposition leaders have said that the peace process should be put on hold but Livni, a frontrunner to become prime minister, stressed last week that Washington should sustain the momentum.
Abbas has already called on Obama to keep the peace process a top US foreign policy priority and speed up efforts to help seal an agreement.
Yesterday’s meeting was also to be attended by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his counterpart Bernard Kouchner of France, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will also be present.
Kouchner on Saturday expressed the wish that Europe would in future be more present in efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, till now largely dominated by the US.
“The EU is now a political force,” he said.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit hosted a dinner banquet for the Quartet on Saturday, and also met separately with Rice, Ban and Abbas, while Rice held a private meeting with Lavrov on Saturday.
The Quartet of the Middle East has long backed a peace deal that would see the establishment of an independent Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel based on a so-called roadmap that was presented to Israel and the Palestinian Authority on April 30, 2003.
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