Settlements will derail direct talks, warns Abbas

PALESTINIAN PRESIDENT Mahmoud Abbas yesterday dispatched letters to the Middle East Quartet members, warning that Israel’s renewal of settlement construction would derail negotiations.

“Settlements and peace represent two parallel tracks which can never meet,” Mr Abbas wrote to the EU, US, UN and Russian leaders.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat warned: “If the Israeli government decides on September 26th to permit the submission of settlement [construction] bids, then there will be no talks.”

This stand, he said, had been adopted late on Friday by the Fatah-dominated executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) when it took the decision to resume direct talks on September 2nd next. Israeli media report there will be no renewal of curbs on construction.

PLO factions, other than Mr Abbas’s Fatah, have condemned the decision.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front said the decision to join direct talks contradicted the authority’s line that there could be no direct negotiations unless Israel agreed the outcome would be a Palestinian state based on the 1967 border, and Israel halted all settlement activity.

Tayseer Khaled, who represents the Democratic Front on the executive committee, said the US call for unconditional direct talks “amounts to a grave assault on the Palestinian national consensus”. He pointed out that the PLO and Fatah had both previously declared their strong opposition to unconditional direct talks.

Other PLO factions warned that Mr Abbas had no mandate to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians because his term of office had expired.

Non-PLO members Hamas and Islamic Jihad were also sharply critical of the decision to accept Washington’s invitation.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the US aim was to deceive the Palestinians.

“At the end of 2007, the Palestinians went to the Annapolis conference” sponsored by the Bush administration “and returned empty-handed. Three years later, we are starting again from the beginning”.

Islamic Jihad spokesman Daoud Shihab said negotiations had never achieved anything for the Palestinians and that talks harmed “the higher national interests of our people”.