West Bank Settlements

"Landep News"

West Bank Settlements

The President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas met on Thursday with the U.S. Democratic Congressional delegation and told them that the bid to U.N. for Palestinian statehood is not his first choice, but it is also not in contradiction with the essence of the peace process.

Abbas said that he was seeking for a Palestinian state without settlements, and added that negotiation is the first step and even the second toward such a goal.

Still, asking U.N. General Assembly to recognize the statehood of Israel does not isolate nor does it deligitimize Israel, and the essence of the peace process is not affected by it, the leader said.

Abbas said that going to the U.N. in September is only a way to promote the two-state solution.

Abbas also spoke about the security in the new state of Palestine, asserting that a third party comprised of NATO forces under U.S. command would take responsibility for it.

According to the leader of the U.S. Congressional delegation, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority Salam Fayyad said that the decision about asking the U.N. General Assembly to recognize full membership of Palestinian state has not yet been finalized.

This is different from the impression that everything was settled on this matter president Abbas conveyed when he met with the delegation. The members of the American delegation told Abbas that the idea of going to the U.N. for recognition is a destabilizing factor for peace.

Palestinians have decided to go to the U.N. for a formal recognition of their state after a year of stalemate in the peace negotiations with the Israelis, caused by the refuse of Israel to end settlement building in the West Bank.

Last year direct talks were launched between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, but they collapsed after two rounds, as Israel resumed building settlements in the West Bank after ten months of freezing the program.

West Bank Settlements

Any other proposition Israel has made the Palestinians did not work toward resuming the negotiations, and not even the American delegation had too much luck with them. Abbas promised that if settlements were resumed there would be no negotiations and he kept his word.

In May 2011, the president of the United States, Barack Obama proposed the territorial swap in order to make sure that the Palestinians get exactly as much land as they used to have before the 1967 annexation of West Bank and Gaza.

At the time, the prime minister of Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu, slammed the American proposition, but he revisited earlier this week and announced he agreed with it.

However, an order of the interior minister to allow the building of 1,600 apartments in East Jerusalem, issued on Thursday drew immediate criticism from the Palestinian Authority and is likely to make the chances for resuming negotiations even slimmer.

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