This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/world/middleeast/peres-says-israel-must-overcome-skepticism-about-peace.html

The article has changed 4 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 2 Version 3
Peres Says Israelis Must Overcome Skepticism About Peace Trying to Revive Mideast Talks, Kerry Pushes Investment Plan for West Bank
(about 11 hours later)
DEAD SEA, Jordan — President Shimon Peres of Israel said Sunday that there was an urgent need for peace with the Palestinians and that Israelis “have to overcome skepticism and doubt” to end the long conflict by establishing “two states for two peoples.” DEAD SEA, Jordan — In an effort to revive the moribund peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Secretary of State John Kerry announced a plan on Sunday to invest as much as $4 billion to develop the economy of the West Bank.
“We shouldn’t be cynical,” Mr. Peres, an advocate of the two-state solution, said as he arrived for a conference of the World Economic Forum. “We shouldn’t lose the opportunity because it will be replaced by a great disappointment.” Sketching out a vision of a transformed Middle East, Mr. Kerry said an infusion of private sector investments could increase the gross domestic product of the West Bank by 50 percent over three years and slash unemployment, which now hovers around 21 percent, by two-thirds.
Mr. Peres is scheduled to speak Sunday evening alongside Secretary of State John Kerry, who planned to present highlights of an economic initiative for the Palestinian territories after two months of an intense effort to revive the peace process that included four visits to the region. Mr. Kerry has said that he hopes to pursue economic and political tracks in parallel, reigniting peace talks while developing agricultural, tourism and technology businesses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many Israeli and Palestinian leaders who are dubious about the prospect of negotiations have been waiting to hear details of the economic proposals. In highlighting the plan at a conference here of the World Economic Forum, Mr. Kerry hoped to spur Israel and the Palestinians to begin talks on a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement amid concerns that the window for initiating negotiations may begin to close.
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and King Abdullah II of Jordan are also expected to attend the session, before which a group of some 300 Israeli and Palestinian business leaders plan to issue their own call for a resumption of negotiations. “Negotiations can’t succeed if you don’t negotiate,” Mr. Kerry said. “We are reaching a critical point.”
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said Mr. Peres “should focus on one thing — convincing his prime minister,” Benjamin Netanyahu, of the need for a two-state solution along the pre-1967 borders. Mr. Kerry said that the investments under the plan would be made in the areas of tourism, light manufacturing, agriculture, construction, energy and technology. The idea would be to give the Palestinians an incentive to negotiate and to ensure that a Palestinian state in the West Bank would be viable.
“He has no problem with Jordan, Palestinians, Egypt, Europeans, Americans — everyone is convinced that the solution is two states on 1967,” Mr. Erekat said. “The only one who needs to be convinced, and I urge Mr. Peres to exert every possible effort to convince him, is the prime minister of Israel saying he accepts two states on 1967.” Neither Mr. Kerry nor his aides provided any details on what specific projects were envisioned, who might invest and what modifications might be required in Israeli restrictions on the West Bank for the plan to work.
“He needs to say it,” Mr. Erekat added. Reporters traveling with Mr. Kerry were told to direct their questions to the “quartet,” a Middle East peacemaking group whose experts devised much of the plan. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain serves as the Middle East envoy for the group, which is made up of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.
Mr. Netanyahu has said that he supported the two states idea, but has described the Palestinians’ insistence that negotiations begin with the 1967 borders as an unacceptable precondition. Mr. Peres, whose role as president is largely ceremonial, met for two hours on Friday with Mr. Netanyahu to “coordinate” the Jordan trip, according to his aides. Mr. Netanyahu also met last week with others attending the World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa, which drew some 800 people from 60 countries, including 70 government ministers. A statement issued Sunday night by Mr. Blair’s office said the economic initiative was intended to parallel the political process and not replace it. Officials from the quartet are still consulting experts on the Palestinian economy and will provide details about specific options “in due course,” the statement said.
Yuval Steinitz, a senior minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, played down the significance of Mr. Peres’s comments. “With all due respect for the place of the president,” Mr. Steinitz said, “diplomatic decisions are made by the government.” As Mr. Kerry has tried to set the stage for negotiations, Palestinian officials said he had asked them to hold off on seeking membership in international forums to underscore their claim to statehood, a request they said they would comply with only until June 7. The Israeli government, meanwhile, has quietly refrained from issuing bids for construction in West Bank settlements or from announcing major building projects.
President Peres had arrived by helicopter hours earlier, and scores of journalists crowded in a lobby of the King Hussein Convention Center on the picturesque edge of the Dead Sea to chronicle his brief statement. “Time is not on anyone’s side in this,” Mr. Kerry said. “And changes on the ground could rob all of us of the possibilities of peace.”
“As far as the Palestinians are concerned we have a functioning beginning and an agreed solution,” President Peres, 89, said in a soft voice. “The solution is the two-state solution – living in peace and dignity. I am aware of the missing links residing between the two ends. From my experience I believe it is possible to overcome them. After his speech, Mr. Kerry went to a private dinner at which his economic initiative seemed sure to be discussed. The guests included Mr. Blair; Tim Collins, a wealthy financier whom State Department officials have described as one of the advocates of the initiative; and the foreign ministers from Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.
“It doesn’t require too much time,” he said. “It is the real interest of all parties concerned. This is an important opportunity to reiterate our will, not to waste time and to return to negotiations and complete the peace process with the Palestinians based on two states for two peoples – an Israeli state and a Palestinian state living as good neighbors and cooperating economically for the good of future generations.” Mr. Kerry has noted that there are people in both the Israeli and the Palestinian camps who are skeptical of the peace process. Some of that skepticism was evident at the conference on Sunday.
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority praised the business initiative while also noting that Palestinian youth had “started to lose their confidence in the two-state solution because what they see on the ground makes them truly have no hope.”
In a forceful and at times angry speech, Mr. Abbas assailed Israel for failing to release Palestinian prisoners as outlined in previous agreements and for refusing to discuss the issue of Palestinian refugees outside of negotiations.
President Shimon Peres of Israel, whose own speech to the meeting was largely a lofty discussion of the yearnings of a young generation, pleaded with Mr. Abbas to save such issues for the negotiating table.
“When I listen to the arguments on both sides, I could say, ‘Well, nothing can happen,’ ” Mr. Peres said, diverging from his prepared text to address his counterpart directly.
“All these differences, they are deep, they are moving, they are important,” Mr. Peres said to Mr. Abbas. “All of this should be really done around the table. Let’s sit together — you’ll be surprised how much can be achieved in open and direct and organized meetings.”
For all of those soothing words, Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, has questioned Mr. Peres’s ability to forge peace, noting his largely ceremonial role. “The only one who needs to be convinced, and I urge Mr. Peres to exert every possible effort to convince him, is the prime minister of Israel saying he accepts two states on 1967,” Mr. Erekat told reporters here Sunday. “He needs to say it.”
Before Mr. Kerry’s speech, a group of Israeli and Palestinian business moguls gave their own impassioned call for negotiations, saying that “the status quo, fraught with shattered hopes, is unsustainable and dangerous.”
The group, calling itself Breaking the Impasse, has met more than 20 times in the past year and includes about 300 executives of high-tech, construction, beverage and insurance companies, as well as banks, and many Palestinian investors from abroad. Representatives of the group said they met on Thursday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and have also met with President Abbas.
Leaders of the group said at a news conference that they would leave the specifics of how to resolve the conflict to the politicians. But Munib R. Masri, a Palestinian billionaire who is one of the leaders of the effort, later told the conference that the two states should be drawn along the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as a shared capital — the standard line of the Palestinian leadership and a position Mr. Netanyahu was sure to reject.
“They call us the silent majority,” Mr. Masri, chairman of the Palestine Development and Investment Corporation, said at the news conference earlier. “We are not silent anymore. We are going to say our opinion in order to have a better life, for us and for our grandchildren in the future.”
Yossi Vardi, a venture capitalist considered a godfather of Israel’s high-tech sector, said with emotion that he had lived most of his 70 years “in the shadow of this conflict,” and warned, “The biggest risk is that we begin to treat it like a chronic disease, we begin to lose hope that it can be solved, though everybody agrees that it should be solved.”
Mr. Vardi told reporters: “Enough is enough. Too much tears were shed by mothers. You may call us naïve, you may ask us what is new, you may have lost hope. But we are cursed — we are going to continue to pursue it.”