TROUBLED TALKS
A timeline of major summits and conferences aimed at Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Oct. 30, 1991: After the 1991 Gulf War, the United States convenes the Madrid Peace Conference, which launches the first public, direct talks between Israel and representatives of Jordan, Syria and the Palestinians. While there are few immediate concrete results, the conference breaks an important psychological barrier.
Sept. 13, 1993: On the White House South Lawn, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat sign the historic Oslo Accord, in which Israelis and Palestinians acknowledge each other's right to exist. A Palestinian government, the Palestinian Authority, is born.
Sept. 28, 1995: Rabin, who would be assassinated little more than a month later — and Arafat sign the "Oslo II" agreement in Washington.
March 13, 1996: President Bill Clinton and other world leaders convene the "Summit of the Peacemakers" in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, aimed at shoring up the peace process in the face of deadly attacks on Israel by Palestinian militants.
Oct. 15-23, 1998: The United States attempts to revive the Oslo peace process during a summit at Wye River Plantation in Maryland. Israeli Prime Minister Benhamin Netanyahu and Arafat agree to a plan that calls on Israel to withdraw from another 13 percent of the West Bank and requires the Palestinians to combat violence and collect illegal weapons caches. Much of the agreement is never implemented.
July 11-25, 2000:In a summit at Camp David, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak deal directly with the core issues of the conflict, including territory and the status of Jerusalem. Arafat rejects U.S. compromise proposals. A new Palestinian uprising commences.
January 2001: Israeli and Palestinian negotiators meet in Taba, Egypt, to try to rescue peace talks. They make progress, but run out of time as Clinton's term comes to an end.
June 4, 2003: Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon meet with President George W. Bush in Aqaba, Jordan, to launch negotiations based on the U.S.-drafted "Road Map" for peace. Never implemented, the plan's conditions included an end to Palestinian violence against Israel and a halt in Jewish settlements.
Nov.27, 2007: The United States convenes a peace conference in the Annapolis, Md., with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and now-Palestinian president Abbas, along with representatives of Arab states and other world powers. The goal is to reach a peace treaty by the end of 2008, but talks effectively end in late December 2008 when Israel, responding to repeated ceasefire violations by the Palestinian group Hamas, launches military operations in the Gaza Strip.
Sept. 2, 2010: President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launch Middle East peace talks in Washington.The Palestinians withdraw after Israel allows a moratorium on Jewish settlements in the West Bank to expire.
Monday: Talks resume after almost three years.
Reuters
With a cast of characters that has presided over numerous failed Middle East peace efforts, the Obama administration launched a fresh bid Monday to pull Israel and the Palestinians into substantive negotiations.
Despite words of encouragement, deep skepticism about the prospects for success surrounded the initial discussions, which were opening with a dinner hosted by Secretary of State John Kerry. He named a former U.S. ambassador to Israel to shepherd what all sides believe will be a protracted and difficult process.
Former envoy Martin Indyk, who played key roles in the Clinton administration’s multiple, unsuccessful pushes to broker peace deals between Israel and Syria and Israel and the Palestinians, will assume the day-to-day responsibility for keeping the talks alive for the next nine months.
Kerry called Indyk a “seasoned diplomat” and said he “knows what has worked and he knows what hasn’t worked.” Neither Kerry nor the State Department would say what has worked in the past, although the fact that there is no peace deal now would seem to indicate that nothing has worked in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian standoff.
President Barack Obama echoed Kerry’s hopeful sentiment in a White House statement that said Indyk “brings unique experience and insight to this role, which will allow him to contribute immediately as the parties begin down the tough, but necessary, path of negotiations.”
The Israeli side will be led by chief negotiator Tzipi Livni, a former foreign minister who was active in the Bush administration’s ill-fated Annapolis peace talks with the Palestinians, and Yitzhak Molcho, a veteran adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was part of the Israeli team involved in Obama’s two previous attempts to broker negotiations. Those two efforts relied heavily on Dennis Ross, a former Indyk colleague and Mideast peace envoy, and veteran negotiator George Mitchell.
The Palestinian team will be led by chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and President Mahmoud Abbas’ adviser, Mohammed Shtayyeh, both of whom have been major players in failed negotiations with the Israelis since 1991.
Kerry spoke for about 45 minutes with representatives from the Israeli negotiating team and then another roughly 45 minutes with the Palestinian side before sitting down for dinner on the top floor of the State Department.
“Not very much to talk about at all,” Kerry joked just before starting dinner shortly after 9 p.m.
They sat at a rectangular table — five U.S. officials lining one side and the two Israeli and two Palestinian negotiators on the other — to dine on sweet corn and shell bean soup, grilled grouper, saffron risotto, summer vegetables and apricot upside down cake.
Despite the presence of so many people whose past experience does not include success, Kerry and other officials voiced cautious optimism about the resumption of talks that he painstakingly negotiated during six months of shuttle diplomacy that began with Obama’s own trip to Israel in March.
“It sounds like we’re lucky to have decades of experience ready to come back to the table and make an effort to push forward,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
Previous attempts to get talks started have foundered on Israel’s continued construction of Jewish settlements on land claimed by the Palestinians and Palestinian attempts to win international recognition as a sovereign state in the absence of a peace deal. Actual negotiations have died because the two sides have been unable to compromise on the most serious disagreements between them: borders, the status of Jerusalem, refugees and security.
With a U.S.-imposed gag order on revealing any details about the substance or framework of the talks, gauging progress will be difficult. But the outlines of any eventual peace deal are fairly well known: a Palestinian state based on the lines that existed before the 1967 war in which Israel seized east Jerusalem and occupied the Palestinian territories, with agreed land swaps and recognition of a secure, Jewish state of Israel.
Ahead of the initial discussions on procedures and guidelines for the meetings, which the U.S. hopes will grow into deeper, more substantive talks on the key sticking points, Kerry urged both sides to strive for “reasonable compromises on tough, complicated, emotional and symbolic issues.”
“Ambassador Indyk is realistic,” Kerry said. “He understands that Israeli-Palestinian peace will not come easily and it will not happen overnight. But he also understands that there is now a path forward and we must follow that path with urgency. He understands that to ensure that lives are not needlessly lost, we have to ensure that opportunities are not needlessly lost.”
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