Posted in ugly Truth on March 6, 2015
Report proves Likud can no longer be seen as guarantor of continued Jewish presence in W Bank, Bennett charges
At one point during his previous term, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered the Palestinians a package of concessions on a number of core issues, including territorial trade-offs involving East Jerusalem and West Bank lands, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported Friday.
Netanyahu's offer, made at an unspecified junction between 2009 and 2013, went as far as offering the Palestinian leadership an outline of a limited right of return for Palestinians refugees, the report specified.
The offer was worked out by Netanyahu's envoy the attorney Yitzhak Molcho and the envoy of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Hussein Agha.
The full title of the document hammered out by the Netanyahu administration is "Draft Proposal for Statement of Principles toward a Permanent Arraignment." Its main tenants appear difficult to reconcile with Netanyahu's right-wing policies, including withdrawal to the so-called 1967 lines.
"There will be a full Israeli withdrawal implemented gradually of Israeli forces from Palestine's territory. The last of the Israeli forces will withdraw with the implementation of the agreement's final stage," the document read, as quoted by the Ynetnewswebsite.
The reasons for the talks' failure is not made apparent in the report; however, Prime Minister's Office denied the offer was ever made.
The report is continuous, to a degree, with an earlier exposé by the Times of Israelwebsite, which claimed last month that Netanyahu was prepared, in the summer of 2011, to okay a far-reaching and comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians that included the creation of a Palestinian state, yet withdrew his support from the initiative at the last moment.
The Time of Israel report was, too, denied by the Prime Minister's Office.
The latest round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, brokered by the top US diplomat John Kerry, ended last April with no agreement. Jerusalem was represented by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Ramallah by the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.
The leader of the ultra-nationalist Habayit Hayehudi party Naftali Bennett singled out the Friday report as compelling evidence that Likud and Netanyahu cannot any longer be seen as the guarantors of Israel's continued presence in the West Bank.
As the alternative, he proposed his own right-wing faction.
"The next disengagement is staring us in the face, once again orchestrated by Likud and Tzipi Livni," he wrote on Facebook. "The 2015 election is turning into a referendum on whether Israelis want the formation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders and Habayit Hayehudi is the final stronghold warding off the dismantlement of Jewish settlements."
Obama wants to reignite Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations
According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, US President Barack Obama is still very much interested in making another serious effort to achieve progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the nearly two years he has left in office.
Senior White House officials told Haaretz on Friday that the decision on how to move forward will only be made after the March 17 election in Israel.
“We would like to see the formation of the new government in Israel and its attitude to this issue. But in the year and a half to two years that Obama has left in the White House, we will have to deal with this issue because time is working against us,” a senior official told Haaretz.
“We want to find the right timing to go for another push and try and promote something on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. I can’t believe we will not give it a try before the end of 2016,” the source further added.
If renewing talks will not be a viable possibility for the new elected Israeli government, the White House does not rule out other options, such as presenting an updated American outline for a solution to the conflict to the international community, Haaretzreported.
Such an outline could include the principles of the framework agreement for a two-state solution that Kerry, Israel and the Palestinian Authority worked on at the end of 2013 and early 2014.
The framework agreement included clauses such as negotiations based on the 1967 borders with land swaps, recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, Jerusalem as the capital of both states, security arrangements for Israel in the Jordan Valley and a timetable for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank.
This updated proposal "might simply be announced publicly or introduced as a UN Security Council resolution updating Resolutions 242 and 338, which for decades have been the benchmarks for negotiations," the Washington Post reported.
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