ISRAEL is up to its old tricks, which does not make anyone optimistic about seeing an end to the Middle East conflict, says an Egyptian commentator.
Wathiq Wajih said on Eyptian radio that just a ‘few days’ after the launch of direct talks between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel, the Israelis returned to their usual practices of closing roads in the West Bank and launching raids on Gaza, ‘in clear contradiction to what it should be doing these days to build bridges of trust.
‘Meanwhile,’ the commentator continued, ‘Israel is trying to imply that Hezbollah is using some old buildings in the Lebanese south as locations to spread its missiles.’
Such Israeli claims would be used ‘as a pretext for any possible new Israeli criminal act against Lebanon.’
Wajih concluded: ‘This is an old trick, which we have become used to in the last years.’
The Palestinian Information Centre has reported ‘fierce confrontations’ in the East Jerusalem township of Al-Isawiyah between local residents and Israeli soldiers.
‘The occupation forces at dawn on September 5th (last Sunday) penetrated the Al-Isawiyah township, opened intensive and indiscriminate fire at houses, and used poisonous gas and sound bombs while a military aircraft was circling above,’ said the report.
‘In the meantime, fierce confrontations erupted between youths from Al-Isawiyah and the occupation forces, which continued firing intensively.’
As these Israeli attacks continued, it was announced that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would go to the Middle East to supervise the next round of the direct talks between Israel and the PA next week.
The US State Department issued a statement, saying that a meeting between Israeli leader Netanyahu and PA head Mahmud Abbas would take place in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh resort on September 14, but the talks would then move to occupied Jerusalem.
Secretary of State Clinton will be accompanied to the Middle East by US envoy George Mitchell.
It was not immediately clear whether her meetings in Jerusalem would be in the form of another trilateral session with Netanyahu and Abbas, or separate sessions with both sides.
The announcement showed what Clinton meant when she said at the opening of the talks at US State Department headquarters in Washington, that ‘the United States has pledged its full support for these talks, and we will be an active and sustained partner.’
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah II were both at the opening of the talks in Washington last week.
Israel’s Netanyahu expressed his thanks for their ‘consistent willingness’.
The ‘willingness of President Mubarak and King Abdullah to attend reflects a sense of readiness that exists in the Arab world,’ Netanyahu was quoted as saying.
The Israeli leader called for ‘original thinking, to think outside the box, as it were.’
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Egypt was determined to help reach a ‘just and honourable’ peace that would place the Middle East ‘on a new track’ that establishes a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital ‘with Al Aqsa’.
In a live address to Arab nations relayed by Egypt’s Channel 1 and Nile News, Mubarak said: ‘The Palestinian issue will continue to be the key to our regional security and the approach to solve the rest of its crises and problems.’
He said that it was ‘not acceptable or logical that the peace process remains still while the suffering of the Palestinian people continues because of the occupation’s oppression and the divisions between the Palestinian leaders and factions.
‘There are also new dangers escalating in the Gulf region and threatening stability,’ he said, in an allusion to Iran.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II met with a number of editors-in-chief of local newspapers and media officials and briefed them on his visit to the United States.
The king spoke about his meetings with US President Barack Obama, Egyptian President Mubarak, PA President Abbas and Israel’s Netanyahu, which were devoted to discussing ways to make face-to-face talks between Israel and the PA a success.
Abdullah said that Jordan deems establishing an independent Palestinian state on Palestinian national soil as a strategic priority and interest, and would spare no effort to support the Palestinians in restoring their right of statehood.
Jordan’s position, he said, was that regional peace and stability could not be achieved without solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, based on the two-state solution and the Arab Peace Initiative.
The direct talks provide an opportunity to settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he said, stressing that the talks should be approached with a positive frame of mind, addressing all final status issues with a vision that commits to the two-state formula and seeks to achieve it as soon as possible.
The Jordanian king said that failure would affect all the countries in the region and the rest of the world, with the price of failure being more wars and conflicts.
He added that the United States considers Palestinian-Israeli peace a national security interest.
After the talks opened last week, PA presidential spokesman Nabil Rudaynah gave an interview, in which he was asked if there was any Israeli or US pledge to stop the resumption of illegal settlement construction in the occupied territories.
Rudaynah said: ‘The position of President Abu Mazen (Abbas) and the Palestinian leadership is very clear: we want an end to the occupation that took place in 1967, especially of holy Jerusalem.
‘As for the other issues, we still have not started the discussions.’
Rudaynah said that ‘The next four weeks will undoubtedly be decisive with regard to the course of the peace process and probably the situation in the entire region.’
He continued: ‘We are going to the negotiations on a clear basis: withdrawal from the territories that were occupied in 1967, the statement of the International Quartet, the recommendations of the Arab Follow-Up Committee, and the Palestine National Council decisions.
‘There are Palestinian constant principles on the basis of which the Palestinian negotiator will negotiate.
‘All issues will be on the discussion table.’
He added: ‘This is a crushing political battle.’
PA President Abbas said: ‘The direct negotiations will begin by dealing with two central issues – the issue of borders and that of security – on the basis of international legitimacy.
‘If progress is reached in these two issues, I think that the negotiations will continue.
‘If no progress is reached and Israel insists on ending the moratorium (on settlement construction), I think that the situation will be very difficult.’
Abbas said in an interview: ‘We even asked that attendance be on the same level as that in Annapolis, namely that all parties from the different countries of the world – especially European countries, the countries of the Arab and Muslim world, and others – should attend and assist these negotiations.
‘America, however, insisted from the beginning that attendance remain restricted to Jordan and Egypt and that Tony Blair attend as Quartet representative.’
Abbas also said that Hamas, the winners of the Palestinian elections in 2006, had no right to say ‘Go to the West Bank and engage in resistance’ against Israel.
Meanwhile, the Hamas-backed Palestinian newspaper Filastin carried an interview with Hatim Abd-al-Qadir, an official in charge of the Fatah movement’s Jerusalem file, who said the PA’s participation in direct talks with Israel showed its political bankruptcy.
Qadir told the newspaper that the PA had ‘committed a mistake’ by participating in the talks, and was bowing to pressure from abroad, particularly US pressure.
The Fatah official said participation in the direct negotiations in light of the escalation of Israeli attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank showed that the PA was in a ‘very bad’ state of affairs and ‘indicates clear political bankruptcy’.
Qadir described the submission of the PA to pressure from abroad as ‘a catastrophe.
‘It is regrettable for the PNA to give in to political pressure from abroad rather than submit to domestic pressure,’ he said, referring to the opposition of the Palestinian masses to the American-supervised talks.
He also said that many Fatah Revolutionary Council and Central Committee members strongly opposed moving to direct talks with Israel.
He said Israel would only exploit the talks ‘to peddle its treacherous plans in Jerusalem’, where the Israeli occupation authorities behave as if the city ‘is their own private property’, demolishing Palestinians’ homes at whim and confiscating their ID cards.
