Growing Arab support to halt peace talks

CAIRO - Despite US efforts to save direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Egyptian and Arab League officials Sunday offered support for the Palestinian decision to pull out if Israel remains unwilling to stop construction in West Bank settlements.

Fresh out of a meeting with Washington’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said the right climate and condition was needed for negotiations to continue.

“The current environment is not favourable, and therefore we have asked the US to continue in their efforts, and Egypt will go in parallel to achieve the goal of halting the settlements,” Aboul Gheit said.

He stressed however that there “would be no direct negotiations” between Israel and the Palestinians, and that Egypt and other Arab states would be willing to take the matter up with the UN Security Council, if settlement construction continues.

Echoing that sentiment, Arab League chief Amr Moussa said the Arab side was considering all options, including bringing the issue before the UN Security Council. He stressed that the Arab League did not fear the possibility of a US veto there. Moussa and Mitchell held a meeting late Saturday.

Although the Arab League is scheduled to meet this week with Palestinian leaders to discuss official Arab and Palestinian positions on the peace talks, “the Palestinians are the ones who are able to establish their own state”, Moussa said.

The tense statements were made during Mitchell’s latest scramble to meet leaders in the region in the hope that they can persuade the Palestinian leadership to continue the talks despite Israel’s refusal to extend a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. The moratorium expired Sep 26.

Mitchell, after meeting Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak Sunday morning, said he has faced “difficulties and obstacles” in his bid to sustain peace talks between the two sides.

“We knew when we began these efforts that there would be a lot of difficulties and obstacles, and there have been,” Mitchell told journalists just after the meeting in Cairo.

“Despite their differences, both the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority asked us to continue these discussions in efforts to establish the conditions under which they could continue direct negotiations,” he said.

Contrary to what the Palestinian leadership said Saturday, Mitchell told reporters that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians wanted to stop the negotiations and that the US would not give up on efforts to keep the two sides in direct talks.

On Saturday, a day after Mitchell left Ramallah, Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) had said it would support Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ending the direct negotiations with Israel.

The PLO said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bore full responsibility for the collapse of the talks, given his refusal to extend the temporary freeze on settlement construction in the face of both US and international pressure to do so and threats by Abbas that he would pull out of the talks if expansion continued.

Mitchell is scheduled to meet Jordan’s King Abdullah in Amman later Sunday on the last leg of his regional visit.

The first direct Israel-Palestinian peace talks in nearly two years were launched in Washington in early September.