WASHINGTON – In an early sign of promise, Israeli and Palestinian leaders pledged Thursday in a cordial first round of talks to meet at regular intervals, aiming to nail down a framework for overcoming deep disputes and achieving lasting peace within a year.
As their facilitator, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to rise above suspicion and skepticism that have blocked peace efforts for decades.
“By being here today, you each have taken an important step toward freeing your peoples from the shackles of a history we cannot change,” she said.
The aim is the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state beside a secure Israel.
Thursday’s results, in the first face-to-face peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians in nearly two years, were acknowledged as modest by all sides.
There was no detailed negotiation on any substantive issue, according to George Mitchell, the administration’s special envoy for Mideast peace, who held months of preparatory talks and was a participant in most of the day’s discussions.
Netanyahu and Abbas will meet again Sept. 14 and 15 in the Middle East, probably at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik, with Clinton and Mitchell attending. The two also agreed to meet roughly every two weeks after that – sometimes with U.S. officials present, other times not.
Mitchell offered no timeline for agreeing on the initial framework, which he said was to be “less than a full-fledged treaty” but more detailed than a statement of principles.
A major obstacle is looming: Israel’s moratorium on Jewish settlement construction in the disputed West Bank is due to expire Sept. 26. The Palestinians have said that unless the freeze is extended, the fledgling peace talks will collapse in short order.
In his public remarks Thursday, Netanyahu made no reference to an extension; Abbas called for an end to settlement expansion, but he raised the matter in the context of both sides living up to commitments, including a Palestinian pledge to end all incitement of violence against Israelis.
That’s not entirely under Abbas’ control.
Gunmen from the militant Palestinian Hamas movement killed four Israeli residents of a West Bank settlement Tuesday and wounded two more on Wednesday. Hamas rejected the talks and stepped up its rhetoric as they began.
