Arab League foreign ministers on Wednesday approved an American proposal that Palestinians hold indirect talks with Israelis, a move that could help restart direct discussions between the two sides that broke down more than a year ago.
The ministers, gathered in the hall of the League of Arab States in central Cairo, supported allowing the United States-mediated talks to go forward for just four months. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said that if the effort did not produce results, the Palestinians would petition the United Nations Security Council to press their case against the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The Arab foreign ministers are all not convinced with Netanyahu, but they decided to give Obama the chance,” Mr. Erekat said in a telephone interview after the meeting.
Direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were cut off after the Israeli invasion of Gaza in late 2008, which Israel said was a response to sustained rocket fire from militants there. Since then Israel has called for resuming talks without preconditions, while the Palestinians have insisted that Israel freeze settlement construction in the occupied territories first. Israel agreed to a partial moratorium, but not a complete freeze.
Faced with the standoff, President Obama’s Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, pressed for the indirect talks during months of shuttle diplomacy. And so with Wednesday’s vote, both sides appeared ready to take a half step back toward negotiating.
Shortly after the vote, Palestinian officials returned to the West Bank to get the expected approval from their political movements. An Israeli government spokesman, Mark Regev, said Mr. Netanyahu welcomed the decision.
Arab officials expressed cynicism about Israeli intentions, but still, officials and political analysts here said they believed that the ministers’ decision showed good will and put Israel in the position of having to do the same.
“Everyone sitting around this table is convinced that the path of negotiations with Israel under the current circumstances has become unbeneficial,” Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the 22-member Arab League, said of the stalemate.
The vote was in part a reaction to the sustained diplomatic efforts by the United States, officials said, and in part a bow to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who came to Cairo looking for support to avoid the political fallout he and his Fatah faction might face among Palestinians if he made the decision on his own.
“They want cover from the Arab League so that no one comes out and says they yielded to American pressures and betrayed us,” said Emad Gad, an expert on international relations with the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a state-financed research center here.
The agreement also seemed to grow from a feeling that the lack of contact had permitted Israel to move with impunity against Palestinian and Arab interests through the expansion of settlements and other recent acts, officials said.
In his remarks, Mr. Moussa said Israel’s “continuous procedures, which were still ongoing until last night, meddling with Jerusalem and the Aksa Mosque and in Hebron and building settlements in the West Bank, defying everyone, is a matter that does not foreshadow, in fact it confirms, that all the paths of negotiations with Israel in this form are unproductive.”
Arab ministers said negotiations must move the sides closer to the terms laid out in the Arab peace initiative that was adopted unanimously in 2002 at an Arab League meeting in Beirut. The initiative offered Israel normalized relations with all Arab countries in exchange for its withdrawal to its 1967 borders, including a pullout from East Jerusalem, and its agreeing to a “just solution” to the issue of return for Palestinian refugees and their families.
“The American administration’s current direction for serious involvement in the peace process is a positive matter and a window of opportunity that can be built upon,” said the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, in comments at the Arab League meeting broadcast live on Egyptian state television.
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