Middle East peace process set for new airing

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has already unveiled his plan to achieve the long-cherished dream of Palestinian statehood which he hopes will win backing at the annual United Nations General Assembly in September.

And Abbas believes some of his European peace partners are ready to support his unilateral move to secure UN recognition of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital.

Frustrated by seven months of stalemate, which has only compounded decades of failed initiatives, Abbas’s diplomatic initiative has been gaining ground even if he still seeks a negotiated comprehensive peace deal with Israel.

After talks in Paris last week, he travels to Berlin on May 5 to press his cause. If France backs the unilateral move, other European nations may follow, much as a slew of Latin American countries followed Brazil’s recognition late last year.

But neither Israel nor the United States wants to see a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now under mounting pressure to present his own peace plan rather than be faced with an imposed solution.

President Shimon Peres, Israel’s elder statesman and a Nobel peace laureate, Friday urged the premier to act before events overtake him. According to Israeli media reports Netanyahu will unveil his own plan in a speech to the US Congress in late May.

“If we don’t want foreign plans, the best way would be a plan of our own, and if we do that, others won’t go ahead with theirs,” Peres said.

Peres was responding to reports that US President Barack Obama is preparing to lay out his own vision for a peace settlement.

Obama would make a speech on the Middle East “perhaps soon,” one US official confirmed said.

The outlines for any peace deal have long been drawn — the Palestinians insist on a state based on the 1967 borders before the Israeli occupation, while Netanyahu has refused a total withdrawal from the West Bank where thousands of Jewish settlers live.

The two sides also remain at odds over the status of east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as capital of their future state, while the Israelis maintain the city must remain their undivided capital.

So there is little room for any new initiatives.

According to the New York Times, the White House will propose a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as a joint capital. But it won’t envisage the right of return for Palestinian refugees — something which will anger the Palestinian side.

Without confirming any details, a senior US official said: “We’re looking at ways to re-energize the process but mindful of fact that no outside party can impose a solution.

“At end of day, this is about the two sides sitting at the table and finding ways to resolve these hard issues.”

For observers however the differences over the core issues at the heart of any peace deal are still too wide.

“Negotiations remain the only realistic path forward, but the gaps on the core issues are too large to bridge at present,” wrote former diplomat Aaron David Miller, a veteran of the peace negotiations.

He judged the chances of success of any new Washington initiative as “slim to none” in a commentary published by the Council of Foreign Relations.