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Doubts loom large after Obama's Mideast summit
Wed Sep 23, 2009 8:45am EDT
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By Alastair Macdonald
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama's brief Middle East summit looked like a victory of sorts to many Israelis on Wednesday, angered Palestinians and raised deep questions about what kind of peace talks, if any, might follow.
Beyond failing to end differences over Jewish settlements in the West Bank lies concern that, whatever agreement Obama coaxed out of the two sides to sit and talk soon, they are so far apart on what is even open to discussion that further frustration lies ahead in a conflict already steeped in 60 years of spilled blood.
One Palestinian official voiced the explicit risk of further stalemate generating a "wave of violence and bloodshed."
"The gap between the positions is unbridgeable in the foreseeable future," Dov Weisglass, a former Israeli negotiator under right-wing premier Ariel Sharon, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth daily. "One's maximum does not approach the other's minimum."
Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas were too beholden to internal pressures to make deals, he said, noting the Israeli leader's alliance with settlers and the challenge Abbas faces from the Hamas Islamists who control Gaza.
Israeli officials were pleased by the first meeting with Abbas since Netanyahu took office in March. A spokesman noted Obama's withdrawal of a demand that Israel stop expanding Jewish colonies on Palestinian land -- Obama instead urged "restraint":
"The prime minister is satisfied because his main position that negotiations should be without preconditions was accepted," Netanyahu's spokesman Nir Hefetz told Army Radio from New York.
Netanyahu himself, who has rejected demands for a settlement freeze, was quoted telling a newspaper: "I understand English -- 'restraint' and 'freeze' are two different words."
He also made clear what his aides have been saying privately -- that he attaches lower priority to dealing with what seems a largely dormant threat from Palestinians than to halting Iran's nuclear program: "The Iranian issue overshadows everything."
For many analysts, a stated willingness to talk to Abbas is a price Netanyahu is paying for U.S. support against Tehran.
ABBAS COULD SHUN TALKS
For Abbas, the meeting was "not productive," an aide said.
Many Israelis saw Abbas's chilly handshake with Netanyahu in New York as a climbdown after he had ruled out talks without a settlement freeze. Mohammad Dahlan, a senior spokesman and former security chief for Abbas's Fatah party, said Abbas could still refuse to accept an invitation from Obama to negotiations.
"The U.S. administration has retreated from its position at the expense of peace," Dahlan told Reuters.
Abbas again demanded on Tuesday that any negotiations should be conditioned on freezing settlement, in line with the 2003 "road map" to peace, and should resume at a point reached a year ago, when Netanyahu's centrist predecessor Ehud Olmert was offering a deal on borders and on dividing control of Jerusalem. Continued...
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