U.S. Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell has extended his trip to the region to Friday.
Negotiations continue between Mitchell and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to see if they can reach an agreement on some sort of settlement freeze. Such an agreement is one key element needed to make way for the announcement of a relaunch of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
It has been anticipated that Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and President Barack Obama would hold a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly opening session events in New York next week.
Sources are saying that while such a meeting is likely to happen, it has not been scheduled, and it’s not clear the parties will have arrived at agreements necessary for a full announcement of peace talks restarting there. An Israeli official told POLITICO on Wednesday that he thinks the meeting itself is likely to take place but that an announcement of a peace talks relaunch could possibly take another couple of weeks.
Beyond continued negotiations on specific issues related to the scope and duration of a settlement freeze, Israeli sources say there’s still uncertainty about the sequence and specifics of how prospective negotiations would proceed. The Palestinians would prefer to move to negotiations on borders, and they fear that the Israelis will try to stay at an interim phase of negotiations, the Israeli official said.
Clinton’s Iftar Dinner
A source who attended the Iftar dinner hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the State Department on Tuesday night relays:
At the head table: the American Task Force for Palestine’s Ziad Asali and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor at George Washington University and the father of Vali Nasr, a senior adviser to Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke.
Holbrooke and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman were there, chatting with ambassadors. Spokesmen P.J. Crowley and Ian Kelly were also there.
The National Security Council’s Dennis Ross and National Security Adviser Jim Jones weren’t seen.
Lebanese and other Arab ambassadors — including the Yemenis — who hadn’t been invited to Obama’s Iftar dinner seemed happy to be invited this time. Clinton made it around to most of the tables at the end and talked to a lot of the attendants.
Equally important as the company, “the food was great.” On the menu? Vegetarian samosas, sundried tomato and feta souffle, tandoori halal chicken with raita, hummus, baba ghanouj, flatbreads and naan, red lentil soup, grilled halal lamb tenderloin, guava barbecued sea bass, basmati rice, sugar snap peas, herb-roasted plum tomatoes, cardamom pears on puff pastry and cinnamon apricot iced tea.
“No alcohol, just Diet Coke, water, sparkling water and apricot drink,” the source adds. “They also offered dried apricots, mixed nuts and dates to break the fast.”
And Another Clinton Dinner ...
Washington Iran experts were headed to dinner with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the State Department on Wednesday night.
Among the outside experts invited to dine with the secretary at the Iran policy dinner, sources say: the Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour, the New America Foundation’s Afshin Molavi, the National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Ray Takeyh, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Haleh Esfandiari, the Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney and George Mason University’s Shaul Bakhash.
“She does these dinners with folks in and out of the building where she solicits views,” one official explained.
The inside-government attendee list was not clear, but one presumes it included Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Bill Burns, the U.S. government point man for international talks on Iran’s nuclear program; his adviser and liaison to the NSC, Elisa Catalano; Iran adviser Jillian Burns in the Office of Policy Planning; Policy Planning chief Anne-Marie Slaughter and deputy Derek Chollet; Iran office head Todd Schwartz; and Shia world expert Vali Nasr.
The dinner comes before Burns is due to meet Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, and his Russian, French, German, Chinese and British counterparts for talks in Turkey on Oct. 1.
Clinton heads to New York on Monday for 10 days at the United Nations, where Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is among the heads of state expected.
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