In his first major foreign policy speech, Israeli deputy Prime Minister and former opposition chairman Shaul Mofaz called on the Palestinians to sit down to launch unconditional talks with Israel.
Mofaz's statement came only days after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made remarks indicating that he might be willing to soften his demands on Israel before direct negotiations, which have been held up since September 2010, can resume.
"It's too soon to know what the real implications of the new coalition government in Israel are," Shlomo Brom, a researcher of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told Xinhua on Sunday, when asked about what effect Kadima party leader Mofaz's inclusion in the government would have on foreign policy.
One of the possibilities floated by Israeli media was that Mofaz joining Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition gave the latter needed stability in order to deal with a number of tough issues, Brom said.
"And one of them can be in the area of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians," Brom said.
A meeting between Mofaz and Abbas may be held later this week in Jordan according to reports in Palestinian newspapers. If so, it would be the first high level meeting in two years.
"It's a possibility that the meeting between Mofaz and Abbas is one of the steps that are aimed at restarting the negotiations between the two sides," Brom said.
While Netanyahu's previous government also enjoyed a stable majority in the Knesset parliament, it was still vulnerable were one party to bolt the coalition.
Mofaz' decision to join the government came as a surprise to most Israelis, since he had for weeks sworn to replace Netanyahu as prime minister. The timing of the agreement, on the night before the Knesset parliament was set to vote on a bill that would disband it and call for elections to be held in September, rocked the Israeli polity.
Most public opinion polls indicated that Kadima would go from 29 mandates to about 10 had election been held later this year.
Jonathan Spyer, a researcher at the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, said that when looking at Mofaz's speech, one needs to keep in mind that all signs indicated that had elections been held this year it would have been the end of Kadima.
"It seems that Mofaz now has a year in which he needs to establish his credentials with the public as someone different from Netanyahu, and these kinds of initiatives are part of Mofaz's efforts to do that," Spyer said.
He added that while some of Mofaz' statements were politically understandable, they were very unlikely to substantively change the current situation, since there are issues which are outside of Mofaz's control preventing a breakthrough from taking place.
One example would be preconditions Abbas has put forward after the last round of talks ended in September 2010, demanding the extension of Israel's self-imposed freeze on settlement construction.
While, Abbas last week tried to soften his stand by implying that a freeze could implemented at a later stage of the talks, he also introduced other demands, among them the release of Palestinian prisoners.
In addition to a construction halt, Abbas wants Israel to accept the ceasefire lines that existed prior to the 1967 war as the borders of an independent Palestinian state, a demand that Israel has rejected.
However, Netanyahu has recently changed his position on the need for Abbas to recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people from something that Abbas needs to acknowledge before the negotiations, to something that can be done during the negotiations themselves.
"Mofaz has a need to portray himself in one way or another as more moderate than Netanyahu or more accommodating," Spyer argued.
Mofaz is the third former army chief in Netanyahu's cabinet, which also includes Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Vice Prime Minister and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon.
Both are considered to be close advisors of Netanyahu on security affairs, but with limited political influence. And this is the type of position that Mofaz is trying to avoid, according to Spyer.
"From Mofaz's point of view, it will have a substantive result of making him different from Netanyahu, but in diplomatic terms I don't expect it to have substantive results," Spyer said.
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