President Obama: It’s time to move forward on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations
NEW YORK—President Barack Obama is pressing Palestinians not to allow Israel’s refusal to halt settlement activities to prevent both sides from reopening long-dormant negotiations towards peace in the Middle East.
As he convened his first-ever three-way meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama pressed both men to come to the negotiating table quickly.
“Simply put, it is past time to talk about us starting negotiations. It is time to move forward. It is time to show the flexibility and common sense and sense of compromise that’s necessary to achieve our goals,” Obama said Tuesday afternoon as he sat between the two leaders at a conference table at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
The chief U.S. negotiator in the Middle East, George Mitchell, told reporters that Obama used the trilateral meeting and one-on-one sessions with each leader to convey a sense of “urgency” and “impatience” about moving forward.
“His view is there is here a unique opportunity at this moment in time that may pass if there is further delay,” Mitchell said. “It’s a mark of the president’s deep personal and ongoing commitment to peace that he chose to participate directly at this juncture.”
Obama invited Abbas and Netanyahu to the three-way meeting even though Mitchell had failed during months of pre-negotiations to clear away obstacles to so-called final status talks. In particular, Israel has rebuffed Obama’s request for a settlement freeze, though Netanyahu has put forward more flexible formulations that limit the scope or rate of settlement expansion.
“We have never identified the steps requested as ends in themselves we have always made clear that they are means to an end,” Mitchell said.
When pressed about whether the U.S. was changing strategy by urging direct talks now without resolving that issue, Mitchell said the media had made too much of the settlements question.
“It may be the case that the public reports have emphasized that area at the expense of others,” Mitchell said. “The emphasis which you describe has not come from us….. We do not believe in preconditions. We do not impose them and we urge others not to impose preconditions.”
Mitchell described the tone of the three back-to-back, 40-minute meetings as “cordial” though he acknowledged that the leaders had sometimes used “blunt” language to convey their points
“Despite all the obstacles, despite all the history, despite all the mistrust, we have to find a way forward. We have to summon the will to break the deadlock that has trapped generations of Israelis and Palestinians in an endless cycle of conflict and suffering,” Obama declared. “We cannot continue the same pattern of taking tentative steps forward and then stepping back.”
Obama detailed some of those steps as he took pains to praise both sides for showing flexibility – while at the same time calling on both sides to do more.
“We have made progress since I took office…but we still have much further to go,” Obama said. “Palestinians have strengthened their efforts on security. They need to do more to stop incitement and to move forward with negotiations….Israelis have facilitated greater freedom of movement for the Palestinians and have discussed important steps to restrain settlement activity but they need to translate these discussion into real action on this and other issues.”
Israeli analysts detected a what they deemed a constructive shift in rhetoric in Obama’s call Tuesday for “restraint” on settlements rather than the outright freeze he argued for previously.
Obama said U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell would meet with negotiators for both sides next week in Washington. Obama also said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would provide him a report on the progress of negotiations by the end of October.
“All of us know this will not be easy, but we are here today because it is the right thing to do,” Obama said. “It is absolutely critical that we get this issue resolved. It’s not just critical for Israel and the Palestinians. It is critical for the world.”
