US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived yesterday in the Moroccan city of Marrakech on the next stop in her diplomatic mission to relaunch the stalled Middle East peace process.
The US top diplomat is scheduled to meet today and tomorrow with her Arab counterparts attending the sixth Forum for the Future, jointly organized by Morocco and Italy.
Clinton traveled to the northwest African country after talks in the Middle East with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The US is pushing both sides to resume peace negotiations that were suspended after the Israeli offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip last December and January.
The situation in the Middle East and the dialogue between the West and the Islamic world will be the two main themes at a dinner debate at the forum this evening.
The Forum for the Future is a joint initiative between the G8 industrial nations and some 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa, along with the European Commission and the Arab League.
Meanwhile, Israel’s prime minister savored a victory yesterday after Washington hailed his “unprecedented” position on settlements and backed his call for peace talks to resume without the construction freeze sought by the Palestinians.
“There is no question that the United States are our staunchest friends and that Israel’s firm stance on its positions pays off,” Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon happily told public radio yesterday.
Speaking before the weekly Cabinet meeting, Science and Technology Minister Daniel Hershkowitz said: “The US administration understands what we have always said — that the real obstacle to negotiations are the Palestinians.”
In a joint news conference held, unusually, before talks with Netanyahu, Clinton pressed for negotiations to be restarted as soon as possible, despite the Palestinian insistence — which Washington backed only a few months ago — that Israel must first put a stop to all settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.
“What the prime minister has offered in specifics of a restraint on the policy of settlements ... is unprecedented,” Clinton said at Saturday’s press conference, adding that “there has never been a pre-condition, it’s always been an issue within negotiations.”
But the Palestinians warned the change in focus was bound to doom Washington’s wider goal of getting a peace agreement to end their decades-old conflict.
“Israel should not be given any excuse to continue building settlements,” Abbas’ spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said. “This is the main obstacle in the way of peace.”
Clinton’s comments marked “a huge disappointment for the Palestinians with respect to the Obama administration,” said Ziad Abu Zayyad, co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal and a former Palestinian minister and legislator.
“The Obama administration has proven once again that it is no different from previous administrations, because it will support whatever Israel accepts and will not support what Israel does not accept,” he said.
In related news, a meeting between Clinton and her Japanese counterpart planned for Friday has been postponed, the US State Department announced. A revised schedule of Clinton’s activities made public late on Saturday dropped any mention of the meeting with Katsuya Okada, which had been previously scheduled in Washington for Friday at 11:30am. No formal explanation was given.
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