AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
September 23, 2011, 6:28 PM EDT By Nicole Gaouette
(Updates with comments from Telhami in fourth, and from 14th paragraph.)
Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S, European Union, Russia and the United Nations called on Israelis and Palestinians to agree within a month on how to resume negotiations, with the goal of reaching a peace accord by the end of 2012.There was nothing in the statement by the so-called Middle East Quartet that indicated how the Israeli-Palestinian impasse might be broken, other than putting the burden on the adversaries to “overcome current obstacles” and resume negotiations “without delay or preconditions.”“We are trying to set up the framework” for talks, said one Quartet diplomat, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland, said there was nothing in the Quartet statement that in itself would likely move the peace process forward. He called it “a fig leaf” that may allow Security Council members to bow to U.S. pressure and not support the Palestinians’ statehood resolution at the UN.The Quartet announcement came shortly after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in a speech to the General Assembly, asked for Palestine to be recognized as a state.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke soon after Abbas and insisted that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. He called for the Palestinians to drop their demand that he freeze Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank.Intensive EffortThe Quartet met throughout the week-long opening session of General Assembly in an intensive effort to agree among themselves on a statement to offer an alternative path to Abbas’ push for recognition.While the prospect of a 2012 deadline offers the Palestinians an end date to achieve a independent state, there have been many failed timetable and road maps in the past. The Quartet diplomats said in their statement that they will consult to identify steps they can take “individually and together” on steps “towards Palestinian statehood.”The statement declared that, at a preparatory meeting to be held within a month, both sides will commit to the objective of reaching an agreement “within a timeframe agreed to by the parties but not longer than the end of 2012.”“The Quartet expects the parties to come forward with comprehensive proposals within three months on territory and security, and to have made substantial progress within six months,” the statement said.Unscheduled MeetingThe Quartet said it would convene an international conference with Israelis and Palestinians “at the appropriate time.”The group also promised to hold a donors conference to raise donations for Palestinian Authority state-building efforts. There was no time set for that event.“The United States is very pleased that the Quartet was able to issue a statement today with a concrete and detailed proposal to begin negotiations between Israel and Palestinians without delay or preconditions,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said to reporters.The Quartet “was never an effective body for negotiating Middle East peace, it was created as an auxiliary to American diplomacy and it has always been led by American diplomacy,” said Telhami.“The Quartet is an asterisk to all of this,” said Telhami, also a nonresident scholar at the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington. “In the end, that’s not going to be what is going to resolve this issue.”The importance of the Quartet statement, he said, “is not in the substance of what it said, but in fact that U.S. was able to line up three other members of Security Council in favor of an approach that the Palestinians, for now, don’t support.”--With assistance from Indira A.R. Lakshmanan in Washington. Editors: Terry Atlas, Steven Komarow
To contact the reporter on this story: Nicole Gaouette in Washington at ngaouette@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net
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