Vice PM Silvan Shalom: PA Preconditions Threaten Direct Talks
Preconditions will cause the failure of direct Middle East peace talks, even before negotiations commence, Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom told Quartet peace envoy Tony Blair on Monday.
Israel and the Palestinians accepted on Friday an invitation by the United States and other powers to restart direct talks on Sept. 2 in a modest step toward forging a peace deal within 12 months to create a Palestinian state and peacefully end one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
Earlier Monday, Haaretz reported that PA President Mahmoud Abbas had warned that renewed Israeli construction in settlements after the end of the construction freeze in late September would bring the newly-aunched direct negotiations to a grinding halt.
Abbas conveyed the message in letters sent to U.S. President Barack Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the High Representative of the European Union on Foreign Policy, Catherine Ashton.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
