Palestinian and Israeli leaders expressed satisfaction and hope on Sunday in their first public utterances after the opening round of Middle East peace talks in Washington last week.
“The structure that has been agreed to is a good one,” the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said in a telephone interview.
He said the two sides had agreed to build a framework within a year for a comprehensive deal.
“We have started a process and have every hope that it will succeed. This is the time for decisions,” he said
In his regular televised appearance before his weekly Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said the fact that King Abdullah of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt went to Washington for the start of the negotiations “reflects a sense of readiness that exists in the Arab world, that this is the time to try and complete a peace settlement between us and the Palestinians and to expand it into a broader circle of peace.”
Aides to Netanyahu said that his 90-minute meeting on Thursday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had gone well and had set the tone for their next meeting on Sept. 14 in Egypt.
Although previous Middle East peace efforts have ended in failure, the current one has a few innovative components — US officials are involved from the very start; all difficult issues are to be negotiated in a package deal, so both sides are forced to compromise and acknowledge the other’s compromises; and the sides have agreed to a one-year deadline.
The immediate challenge facing the process is Israel’s moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank which ends on Sept. 26. The government does not seem inclined to extend it, but the Palestinians have repeatedly said that if construction starts again, the talks will end.
However, Netanyahu spoke on Sunday about the need to “embrace original thinking, to think outside the box” in these talks, and it was clear that efforts were under way to find a formula to keep the process going after the deadline.
“The Israelis have to choose between settlements and peace. They can’t have both,” Erekat said
He did not say that if construction restarts in West Bank Jewish settlements on Sept. 26, the peace process halts. Instead, he said this was not an issue he wished to discuss now.
This could indicate that negotiations are under way to permit the talks to continue after the moratorium ends. Such a deal might include sweeteners for the Palestinian leadership — release of Palestinian prisoners, for example or changes on the ground in the West Bank.
Aides to Netanyahu said on Sunday, if the Palestinians walked away from negotiations over the settlement construction deadline, it would be evidence that they had not been serious about reaching an agreement.
last week in Washington asked by Israeli reporters for details of his talks with Abbas, Netanyahu declined, saying: “You want headlines. I want an agreement.”
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