Flurry of diplomacy ahead of ME Summit

JERUSALEM—British and French foreign ministers met Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Sunday in a bid to boost the chances of success at a US-sponsored Middle East peace meeting later this month.
The flurry of diplomacy came amid lowered expectations for the conference planned in Annapolis, Maryland in late November with the aim of kickstarting long-dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank were the main obstacle to achieving peace in the intractable decades-old conflict. “I will say in my meetings with Israelis what I have already told them and what France repeats every day — settlements are not only illegal, politically they are also the main obstacle to peace,” he was quoted as saying in the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam.
“For the peace process to advance, Israel must bring an immediate stop to this.” Palestinians have written to the US government ahead of the Annapolis meeting, demanding a complete freeze to the expansion of Jewish settlements. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was expected to announce at Annapolis a freeze to all settlement construction, a senior Israeli official has told.
“Annapolis will not be a failure because the fact that it is being held is a success in itself,” Olmert’s office quoted him as saying after meeting Kouchner who held talks later with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in Ramallah. The summit “will relaunch the negotiations that haven’t been held over the past seven years,” Olmert said.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband was meeting Israeli foreign and defence ministers on Sunday ahead of talks with Olmert on Monday. He met with Abbas shortly after arriving on Saturday. Amid the Western diplomatic offensive, both sides confirmed that Abbas and Olmert were preparing to hold their own last round of talks on Monday before the US meeting. The two last met on October 26.
The heads of the negotiating teams for Annapolis, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Palestinian premier Ahmed Qorei, were also due to meet on Sunday, Israeli public radio reported. Negotiators have held intensive talks in a bid to hammer out a joint declaration outlining a solution to the Middle East conflict which they hope to present at the US talks.
But they remain at odds over the document, with the Palestinians wanting it to address the core issues such as borders, the fate of refugees, settlements, and the status of Jerusalem and the Israelis preferring a more general statement of shared principles.
Differences over the document have lowered expectations for the meeting. In talks with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Friday, Abbas said he was pessimistic. The Palestinians “are so far unhappy with the Israeli position, because the Israelis have not offered something that could ensure the success of the conference,” the Palestinian ambassador in Riyadh, Jamal al-Shobaki, told reporters.
Abbas told Abdullah that Washington should “put pressure on Israel, obliging it to comply with the terms of reference of the peace process, namely the (internationally drafted) roadmap, the Arab peace initiative and UN resolutions,” Shobaki said.
US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack has insisted that it was “important not to lose sight of something very important that is happening after Annapolis, and that is that there is going to be a day after Annapolis and a day after that and a day after that.”
Livni told a news conference with Kouchner that after Annapolis the most important meeting would be a Paris donors’ conference for the Palestinians next month. “The success of the Annapolis meeting is launching a process of dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians on all the outstanding issues that need to be solved in order to create a Palestinian state as part of the vision of two states for two people.”—Agencies