Israeli and Palestinian leaders held a new round of talks on Wednesday, meeting for the first time with their negotiating teams to try to bridge gaping differences ahead of a United States-sponsored peace summit.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas met one-on-one for the fourth time in less than two months in Jerusalem before being joined by their newly formed negotiating teams.
Following the two-hour talks, a senior Israeli official told reporters the ”two leaders reached an understanding of their expectations from the teams, which will hold several intensive sessions in the coming weeks ahead of the international meeting in November” in order to draft a joint statement.
”Our intention is to start open-ended talks on a permanent agreement after the November meeting,” the official said.
”The two sides understand that the timetable is such that it cannot allow reaching a permanent agreement before November. Therefore we cannot enter a minefield we know we will not be able to cross by November.”
It remained unclear, however, what type of an agreement the two sides would come up with ahead of the meeting, with the Israeli official saying ”it will be sufficiently general in order not to fall into any pitfalls, but at the same time will allow us to move forward”.
Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat was due to brief reporters on the results of Wednesday’s meeting later in the day.
The two sides have remained far apart over what kind of document to draw up ahead of the Middle East conference, called by US President George Bush and expected to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, in November.
The Palestinians want a detailed agreement and an implementation timeframe on the thorniest problems of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict — borders, refugees and the status of Jerusalem.
Embroiled in a months-long struggle for power with the Islamist Hamas movement, Abbas and his secular Fatah faction want a detailed accord on the core issues that have sunk previous peace talks.
The Israelis favour a looser document — a joint declaration or a declaration of interests are the terms that have appeared in the Israeli media — ahead of the international meeting.
Olmert wants to stay vague so as not to rock his government coalition, which includes ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties that could oppose some of the concessions that Olmert’s centrist Kadima movement and its main partner, centre-left Labour, may be willing to make.
Efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks after a nearly seven-year deep freeze were relaunched after Abbas appointed a Western-backed Cabinet following Hamas’s bloody seizure of power in the Gaza Strip in mid-June.
Abbas — who last met Olmert on September 10 — said last week that Israel and the Palestinians could sign a peace deal within six months of the international peace conference.
”Then we will begin negotiations on the details under a timeframe, which ought not to exceed six months, to reach a peace treaty,” he said.
Olmert, who faces new criticism at home after the Attorney General launched a second criminal investigation into his affairs, has also voiced cautious optimism over the talks with Abbas.
”In recent months, we have already managed, Abu Mazen and I, to establish the start of a mutual trust and begun to iron out differences,” he said in a speech last month.
But Olmert has sought to play down expectations ahead of the November summit, insisting it is ”not a peace conference, but rather an international meeting”. — AFP
