Opening up the peace process

[shira]

In recent months, veteran Middle East experts such as Hussein Agha and Robert Malley or Aaron David Miller have done a good job explaining why peace between Israelis and Palestinians is likely a long way off. But it seems that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, begs to differ: Haaretz reported that Abbas declared negotiations could be completed "within six months" if Israel halted all settlement construction.

This is clearly meant as a challenge to the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been repeating for months that he is ready for serious negotiations. However, except for critics and opponents on the right, few seem willing to believe Netanyahu – though Haaretz readers were in for a big surprise last month when Aluf Benn, one the paper's senior columnists, declared that Netanyahu had convinced him that his desire to achieve a peace agreement was indeed sincere. Apparently, this turned out to be the most controversial column Benn has ever written.

In a subsequent article in early December, Benn argued that Netanyahu had never been a strong ideological supporter of the settlements, and that he had become convinced that Israel's long-term interest was best served by a two-state solution that would include serious security guarantees for Israel.

Benn's colleague Ari Shavit endorsed this analysis and argued that "Netanyahu has crossed the Rubicon, on both ideological and practical levels, and reinvented himself as a centrist", but Shavit complained that Abbas "isn't giving Netanyahu anything he can use to put the centrist worldview he has adopted into action".

more...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/17/israel-palestine-peace-mahmoud-abbas

[azurnoir]

1. This article has already been posted

it is here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x296093

Ha'aretz did one of it's title changes and the artticle is well summed up in the last paragraph

Shaul Arieli of the Council for Peace and Security, which developed a map with a final border as part of the Geneva Initiative, said Israel's capacity to swap territory with a future Palestinian state is more limited than what Olmert reportedly proposed.

[shira]

2. thanks - I changed the OP