JERUSALEM (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s Middle East envoy began a round of meetings yesterday aimed at relaunching negotiations, while the Palestinian leader said he feared the 20-year-old peace process with Israel was close to collapse. George Mitchell, the US mediator, met Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak in Tel Aviv, an Israeli spokesman said. In keeping with Mitchell’s low-key style, he made no public comment.
He was to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a day later. Officials expect discussion on formats for the four months of “proximity talks” to which Abbas agreed last week after a year of demanding Israel end settlement building before negotiations could resume.
Though violence is low compared to the bloodshed in the early part of the last decade, tensions are rising over land and holy sites around Jerusalem and the West Bank since Netanyahu came to power at the head of a right-led coalition a year ago, adding urgency to US and European pressure for peace talks.
Clashes on Friday between Palestinians and Israeli forces at Jerusalem’s flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque drew a call for restraint all round from the UN Security Council and an accusation from Abbas that Israeli “provocation” aimed to wreck peace moves and risked sparking a “war of religion” across the Middle East.
Abbas, who won backing on Saturday from his Fatah party’s Central Committee for the return to talks, accused Netanyahu of intransigence on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory that, he said, had brought the peace process close to collapse.
“The peace process has almost reached a dead end,” he said in a speech in Ramallah, citing Netanyahu’s refusal to stand by compromise offers made by his predecessor before Abbas broke off prior negotiations in late 2008 over Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
Despite a temporary, partial freeze on building in the West Bank, the expansion of Jewish settlements on land occupied since 1967, as well as an Israeli heritage plan announced last month to include West Bank religious sites “threaten … to open the door to a dark future that awaits us all,” he said.
“The Israeli government continues to procrastinate to gain time and strengthen its control of the occupied territories to prevent any realistic possibility of establishing an independent, viable … state of Palestine,” Abbas added.
Netanyahu’s government has said it is willing to discuss any issue with Abbas but has made clear that, particularly given the strength of Abbas’s rivals in the hardline, Islamist Hamas movement which controls the Gaza Strip and is popular elsewhere, an early deal delivering a Palestinian state is unlikely.
The prime minister has also dismissed calls for Israel to give up control of all Jerusalem and allow the east of the city, captured in 1967, to be the capital of such a Palestinian state.
A demonstration against Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem by several thousand Palestinians and Israeli peace activists passed off peacefully last night. Trouble had been feared with settlers who claim a religious right to all of the city.
In the West Bank, relatives buried six members of a single Palestinian family who were killed when their car collided with an Israeli military vehicle on Friday. Reflecting popular anger, officials from Fatah said the soldiers were to blame.
Sources on both sides have said they expect Mitchell to secure agreement on a format of talks between negotiators to begin possibly in Washington or elsewhere abroad fairly soon.