Washington Palestinian - Israeli Talks part 2
Palestinian diplomatic sources said the decision to only send PLO Executive Committee member Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen,) Dr. Saeb Erekat and Dr. Nabil Shaath was taken in light of Israel's failure to arm its foreign minister with the appropriate authority to discuss the major issues that were included in the agenda of the Washington talks.
Those issues, they said, included the Israeli troops further redeployment in the West Bank and the cessation of all Jewish settlement activities in the Occupied Territories. Israel, the sources said, dispatched its heads of negotiating committees hoping to convene talks on minor issues like the airport, the harbor and the industrial zone, all in Gaza. "Those issues could be agreed upon in Tel Aviv and there is no need to go to Washington to resume discussions on these topics. It seems, however, that Israel wanted to change the agenda of Washington talks in order to portray to the world that some progress is achieved and hence claim that the Doha International Economic Conference in Qatar can take place this month without any need to boycott it by any of the Arab countries," said one source.
The PNA, however, hinted it would be ready to send heads of the negotiating committees once progress is achieved. In the meantime, the PNA demands that talks in Washington concentrate on the central issues of redeployment and the time-out in Jewish settlement activities.
Long before the talks in Washington were resumed, the PNA has made it clear that it was expecting a breakthrough in the questions of further redeployment and Jewish settlements. Towards the end of last week, PNA President Yasser Arafat said the Washington talks were to prove themselves as useless as long as Levy is not empowered to reach agreements with the PNA on the issues of settlement and redeployment.
A senior Israeli official was quoted Monday by MA'ARIV Hebrew daily as saying that the Palestinians have opted for a "daring gamble, whose goal is to lure Israel into a trap and place Levy in an impossible situation in which he will be compelled to cope with two problems for which he has no clear mandate to answer -- a building freeze in the territories, and the second phase of redeployment.”
Throughout the whole of last week, the Americans spoke firmly of the need to reach quick results in the topics most important to the Palestinians: determining a timetable for meaningful Israeli pullback in the framework of the second redeployment, and a freeze in settlement activity.