Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Talks won’t ‘yield results’

http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=174703
With US Mideast envoy George Mitchell scheduled to meet with Prime 
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday and finally begin US mediated 
indirect talks with the Palestinians, Deputy Premier Dan Meridor – who 
along with Defense Minister Ehud Barak represents the “moderate” flank 
in Netanyahu’s seven-minister inner cabinet – told The Jerusalem Post a 
day earlier that indirect talks would lead nowhere.
In an interview that will be published in full in Friday’s Post, 
Meridor, who is in charge of intelligence and atomic affairs, said he 
was afraid the Palestinians were trying to avoid making “tough 
decisions,” by maneuvering the US and the world into imposing a solution 
to the conflict.
A senior government official, meanwhile, said late Tuesday evening that 
it was not certain that the indirect talks would start as expected with 
the Mitchell-Netanyahu meeting on Wednesday, and placed the blame on the 
Palestinians for adding an additional hurdle. The official would not 
elaborate.
According to the official, Netanyahu and his staff completed all the 
preparations for starting the talks, and would be glad to start them at 
the meeting with Mitchell. The official said the hope was that the 
Palestinians would not, as he said they appeared to be doing, delay the 
resumption of negotiations.
Meridor said a Palestinian attempt to avoid making tough decisions and 
bring about an imposed solution “won’t work.”
“This won’t work,” Meridor told the Post. “And I think the Americans 
tell this to the Palestinians. I think the corridor we go through, the 
entrance we go through to the [direct] talks – indirect talks, proximity 
talks – will not yield results. I hope yes, but think not. Everyone will 
want to pull America to their own side, and they won’t get closer, 
[rather] they will get farther apart...
“I think we need to go quickly to direct talks, in which we’ll have to 
make tough decisions, and they will have to make tough decisions,” 
Meridor said.
No one, he said, not the US, the European Union or the UN, can decide 
“for us that French Hill [in northeast Jerusalem] is Palestine, or 
Ma’aleh Adumim [east of the capital] is Palestine. They cannot do that. 
We need to come to an agreement.”
And this agreement, Meridor said, will only come through direct 
negotiations and tough decisions by both parties. He defined tough 
decisions as those that go against the “expectations of your own people.”
Meridor said Menachem Begin’s decision at Camp David in 1978 to cede 
Sinai to Egypt, as well as Anwar Sadat’s decision to come to Jerusalem 
in 1977, were examples of “tough decisions.” He also cited the Oslo 
process, which he voted against and thinks was a mistake, and 
Netanyahu’s announcement last summer at Bar-Ilan University that he 
would accept a demilitarized Palestinian state, as examples of tough 
decisions made by Israeli leaders.
“I haven’t seen Palestinian leaders taking tough decisions, this is the 
bottom line,” Meridor said. For Palestinians, comparable “tough 
decisions” would be acknowledgement that Palestinian refugees would not 
be allowed to return to Israel, or the acceptance of a Jewish state 
alongside a Palestinian one.
Because of a failure of the Palestinian leadership to make the tough 
decisions needed to “end the conflict,” Meridor said he was skeptical of 
the likelihood of getting an agreement within a short time.
Therefore, alongside negotiations for an agreement – a paradigm that 
represents a top-down approach to solving the conflict – what is needed 
in parallel is to continue with Netanyahu’s bottom-up approach that he 
articulated at Bar-Ilan University, Meridor said. This approach, which 
he said the government was committed to, includes building more 
institutions for the future Palestinian state, and improving both the 
economy and law and order in the West Bank.
Israel, Meridor said, has a “very keen interest” in moving the peace 
process forward, even if everything could not be solved right away. He 
said it was an illusion to believe that the relatively “good situation 
now, with no terror,” was sustainable over the long term without 
diplomatic progress.
“Because if there are not two states here, there will be one state,” 
Meridor said. “If this one state is to be what we know to be a 
democratic state, there is a danger to the whole Zionist project. 
Because you can’t have a South Africa here. Nobody wants it, nobody has 
that in mind.”
Meanwhile, during a briefing at the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and 
Defense Committee on Tuesday morning,  Brig.-Gen. Yossi Baidatz, head of 
Military Intelligence’s Research Division, told MKs that the 
Palestinians were “already preparing the ground for the failure” of the 
proximity talks.
He said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas wanted to paint 
Israel in a negative light in order to bring about its global isolation.
“Although the PA president is interested in an agreement with Israel, 
his flexibility on the core issues is limited, and we don’t see any real 
attempt at being more flexible on the essential matters,” Baidatz said.
He added that the Palestinians – and, for that matter, the Syrians – 
were interested in securing a peace deal with Israel, but that they felt 
that Netanyahu was not a good partner for talks.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, is scheduled to meet with Mitchell on Wednesday, 
and even though this is being touted as the long sought after start of 
indirect, or proximity, talks, the modalities of how it will all work 
are still unclear. Mitchell is then expected to meet with Abbas on 
Friday. He is scheduled to leave the region on Sunday.
This is the same type of shuttle diplomacy that Mitchell has engaged in 
over the past year, and one senior diplomatic source said it was not 
clear what would be different now under the “proximity talks” rubric. 
The official said that the immediate issues that would need to be 
discussed would be the modalities and goals of the new framework, as 
well as what issue to discuss first.
Although the Palestinians are keen on the two sides first tackling the 
question of borders, Israel wants the first issues to be security and 
the Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
Even though the so-called core issues – Jerusalem, security, borders and 
refugees – are to be discussed during the indirect talks, one official 
noted that other preconditions the Palestinians set for the talks, such 
as a complete building freeze in the settlements and in east Jerusalem, 
were not met.
In a related development, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper 
announced on Tuesday he would host Netanyahu in Ottawa during a working 
visit to Canada on May 31.
“It is a pleasure to welcome Prime Minister Netanyahu to Canada,” Harper 
said in a statement issued from his office. “Our countries have a close 
and enduring friendship which we are working to further strengthen. 
There is tremendous respect in Canada for the courage, resilience and 
determination of Israel and its people.”
Netanyahu’s office confirmed the visit, saying the prime minister would 
travel to Canada, whose government is one of the most supportive of 
Israel in the world, in the last week of May.

 maneuvering the US and the world into imposing a solution to the conflict.
Wow!  Un piccolo popolo e' in grado di manovrare gli USA e, addirittura, il
mondo intero!
Sara' vero o e' un *COGLIONE* chi ha fatto una simile affermazione?
Ai posteri l'ardua sentenza.
-Stefano