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Kerry Says It’s ‘Reality Check Time’ in Stalled Mideast Talks Kerry Says It’s ‘Reality Check Time’ in Stalled Mideast Talks
(about 2 hours later)
RABAT, Morocco — Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that the Obama administration planned to re-evaluate its approach to Middle East peacemaking and decide whether it was worth continuing its effort in light of the inability of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to make progress. RABAT, Morocco — Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday that the Obama administration planned to re-evaluate its approach to Middle East peacemaking and decide whether it was even worth continuing the effort in light of the inability of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to make progress.
In response to a question while visiting Morocco, Mr. Kerry said that he would return to Washington to confer with President Obama before deciding on the next steps. He said it was “reality-check time.” “There are limits to the amount of time and effort that the United States can spend if the parties themselves are unwilling to take constructive steps in order to be able to move forward,” said Mr. Kerry, who added it was “reality check time.”
“There are limits to the amount of time and effort that the United States can spend if the parties themselves are unwilling to take constructive steps in order to be able to move forward,” he said. Forging a Palestinian and Israeli peace has been Mr. Kerry’s top diplomatic priority since he became secretary of state and one he has pursued in more than a dozen visits to the region.
“We intend to evaluate,” he added. “Both sides say they want to continue. Neither party has said they have called it off. But we are not going to sit there indefinitely. It is not an open-ended effort.” The tumultuous events in Ukraine and the civil war in Syria forced themselves onto the agenda of an Obama administration, whose priorities have been at home. Iran’s nuclear program has been a major concern for several American administrations.
Israel and the Palestinian Authority have been at odds in recent days over Israel’s refusal to release a batch of Palestinian prisoners and over the Palestinian Authority’s applications to join a number of international organizations. Neither side informed the Americans before taking the steps, officials said. But Mr. Kerry, virtually single-handedly, has pushed the Middle East peace process toward the top of the administration’s foreign policy priorities, declaring at one point that his goal was to achieve a comprehensive peace accord within nine months.
Some critics have asserted that Mr. Kerry has devoted too much attention to pursuing Middle East peace at the expense of other pressing foreign policy issues. The secretary’s goals have gradually receded as his Middle East team tried to coax the two sides to negotiate over issues that have bitterly divided them for decades.
Mr. Kerry defended his efforts, saying that the nearly nine months he has spent trying to encourage serious talks in the Middle East were not wasted because the parties had narrowed their differences on divisive matters. After securing a full treaty seemed too daunting, Mr. Kerry’s team focused on securing a “framework” within their nine-month target date that would outline the main parameters of an agreement.
But he acknowledged that the United States faced an array of foreign policy challenges, including in Ukraine, Iran and Syria. More recently, just persuading the two sides to extend the talks beyond April has been Mr. Kerry’s all-consuming mission.
Even then, Mr. Kerry has clung to his ultimate vision of completing a comprehensive accord that would resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all.
Mr. Kerry, who left for Europe on March 23 to attend a nuclear security summit in The Hague with President Obama and has not been back to the United States since, interrupted his recent travels to rush to Amman and then Jerusalem to try to salvage the talks. But he encountered frustrating setbacks that suggested that neither side was prepared to yield to the United States’ entreaties.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, did not inform Mr. Kerry of his Tuesday speech in which he announced that the Palestinian side would sign 15 international agreements and treaties — a move the Palestinians made in response to Israel’s reluctance to release, as promised, a fourth group of Palestinian prisoners.
Nor did Israel give Mr. Kerry advance warning before formally declaring on Thursday that the last batch of prisoners would not be set free.
As Mr. Kerry prepared to return to the United States on Friday, he acknowledged at a news conference here that the actions of both sides had been “unhelpful.”
Even so, some experts say, that Mr. Kerry is so committed to his Middle East initiative that is more likely that he will push for a change in diplomatic strategy, perhaps by tabling an American peace plan, instead of simply walking away from the Middle East talks.
“I think it is a tactic to get the parties to get him more involved,” said Robert M. Danin, a former American official who worked on Middle East issues.
“I find it surprising that Secretary Kerry, after driving this process so hard, did not play the one card he has left, and that is to put down an American plan or set of ideas for the agreement he has been seeking,” Mr. Danin added. “That suggests to me that he may be contemplating a pause but not abandonment of his peace efforts.”
An Israeli official with knowledge of the negotiations, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of Mr. Kerry’s ban on discussing them publicly, also said he did not believe that Washington would really withdraw from the process.
“I don’t think they’re going to take a back seat,” the official said. “For the time being I expect the U.S. will continue to be very much involved. They may draw some conclusions from what happened in terms of how their role should be played, but they will continue to play a very important role.”
Mr. Kerry, in fact, was careful to leave open the possibility that the Obama administration would elect a course correction, and not a pullback, from the Middle East peace talks.
“We are going to evaluate very carefully exactly where this is and where it might possibly go,” he said in response to a question. “We are going to evaluate what is possible and what is not possible.”
Still, Mr. Kerry is just one principal in policy deliberations that also involve the White House. And the heightened difficulties in the Middle East talks have increased at a time when 40,000 Russian troops are within striking distance of Ukraine, the peace talks over Syria have collapsed and it remains far from clear that Iran is prepared to go beyond the interim accord that freezes much of its nuclear program by agreeing to a stricter and more comprehensive agreement.
Nor was the mutual blame that Israeli and Palestinian officials engaged in on Friday encouraging.
“Every time there is a proposal on the table, whether Israeli or American or American-Israeli that obligates the Palestinians to make a decision, they disappear,” Tzachi Hanegbi, a member of Israel’s Parliament from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said on Israel radio. “They are, unfortunately, incapable of making a decision that entails an historic compromise.”
But Muhammed Shtayyeh, a senior aide to Mr. Abbas and former member of the negotiating team, said the crisis was caused by Israel’s insistence that the fourth batch of prisoners promised as part of the nine-month talks started last summer would be freed only if Palestinians agreed to extend negotiations for another nine months.
“What is happening now is that Netanyahu is trying to get us to pay five times for the same thing,” Mr. Shtayyeh said.
Defending his past emphasis on the Middle East, Mr. Kerry said on Friday that his counterparts have regularly raised their concerns over the Israeli-Palestinian problem. The months he has spent trying to encourage serious talks, Mr. Kerry insisted, were not wasted because the parties have narrowed their differences on some key issues.
But he also acknowledged that the United States was now facing an array of foreign policy challenges that were competing for the White House’s attention, ticking off Ukraine, Iran and Syria.
“We have an enormous amount on the plate,” he said.“We have an enormous amount on the plate,” he said.
Yair Lapid, the centrist Israeli finance minister, said Friday that the events of the past day “raised serious doubts” about whether Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, was really interested in reaching an agreement. He was referring to a broad new list of demands that the Palestinian news agency Maan said on Thursday was being presented by Palestinian negotiators as a condition for extending the talks.
“It looks more like a deliberate provocation aimed at blowing up the talks,” Mr. Lapid, whose Yesh Atid Party has backed the negotiations, wrote on his Facebook page. “No Israeli will conduct negotiations at any price.”
Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli general serving as a consultant to the negotiations, said Friday that Mr. Abbas’s international gambit “pushed us into a deep crisis.”
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economy minister and the leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, responded to reports that the Palestinians were threatening to have Israel prosecuted at the International Criminal Court by revealing that he had begun preparations to bring claims against the Palestinians. Yediot Aharonot, a leading Israeli newspaper, reported Friday that Mr. Bennett had consulted international law experts and determined that rocket fire from the Gaza Strip and payments by the Palestinian Authority to prisoners could be grounds for legal action.
“I hear Abu Mazen saying that if there is no prisoner release he will go to The Hague, so I’m telling him: Go, you’ll have lawsuits waiting for you there,” Mr. Bennett was quoted as saying, using Mr. Abbas’s nickname. “We want to have a bullet in the barrel against Abu Mazen.”
The new Palestinian demands, according to Maan, included a written commitment from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel recognizing a Palestinian state along the border lines from before the 1967 war, with East Jerusalem as the capital; the release of 1,200 Palestinian prisoners; and an end to Israeli travel, import, export, fishing and farming restrictions in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials involved in the talks said they could not agree to such conditions because they were final status issues that need to be negotiated.. Several Palestinian leaders were quoted in the local news media Friday as saying the Maan report was not accurate, but they declined to specify what new demands had been made.
On Friday, politicians on each side of the disagreement sought to blame the other for the breakdown.
“Every time there is a proposal on the table, whether Israeli or American or American-Israeli, that obligates the Palestinians to make a decision, they disappear,” Tzachi Hanegbi, a member of Parliament from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said on Israeli radio. “The Palestinians have a deep problem, a leadership problem,” he said. “They are, unfortunately, incapable of making a decision that entails a historic compromise.”
But Muhammad Shtayyeh, a senior aide to Mr. Abbas and a former member of the negotiating team, said the crisis stemmed from Israel’s insistence that a fourth batch of prisoners, promised as part of the nine-month talks that started last summer, would be freed only if the Palestinians agreed to extend negotiations for another nine months.
“What is happening now is that Netanyahu is trying to get us to pay five times for the same thing,” Mr. Shtayyeh said. “Talks are not about extensions, talks are about intentions.”
Violence broke out Friday afternoon at a protest against the canceled prisoner release outside a West Bank prison, with Palestinian officials reporting that 40 demonstrators were injured by Israeli forces using live ammunition, rubber bullets and tear gas. Some 250 people carrying Palestinian flags and pictures of prisoners had gathered for prayer outside Ofer Prison, between the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Bitunia.
“We will continue our marches and our protests, to send a message to the United States that Israel must release the fourth batch of prisoners,” said Mahmoud Al-Aloul, a member of the central committee of Mr. Abbas’s Fatah faction, who helped organize the demonstration. “The United States should pressure Israel to do that.”
The Palestinian medical relief committee said that seven people sustained gunshots to their legs; eight were hit by rubber bullets; and 24 suffered from tear-gas inhalation. A spokeswoman for the Israel Defense Forces said soldiers had used .22-caliber rounds and other riot-dispersal means because protesters burned tires and threw rocks, and that five of the injured had been taken to a hospital.
Samer Salah, a 26-year-old construction worker from the village of Kuber, said he was hit by rubber bullets that broke through the windows of his old Subaru as he arrived at the demonstration.
“The soldier who hit me was only two meters away from me,” Mr. Salah, whose head was bleeding, said in a cell-phone conversation with his wife. “I came here to participate in the prayer, and I wish I didn’t come.”