France wants bigger role in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts
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Version 0 of 1. JERUSALEM — France’s top diplomat traveled to the Middle East over the weekend to take a crack at solving the seemingly unsolvable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, offering a new way forward that includes a possible U.N. resolution setting out broad terms for ending the impasse and an offer of help from the Europeans and Arab nations. Israeli leaders were hostile to the French proposal, while the Palestinians were polite but distant. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said in a joint news conference with his French counterpart that they would do what they could to support the effort, according to the Maan news agency. U.S. diplomats have been vague. At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing last week, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, did not answer directly when asked whether the United States would veto a French resolution to support the creation of a Palestinian state. On his two-day trip to Cairo, Ramallah and Jerusalem, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius sought to sell the idea of a French-led initiative to reboot the peace process with backing from an “international support group” formed by the European Union, Arab nations and U.N. Security Council members, including the United States. “It’s been 40 years,” Fabius said, referring to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which began in 1967. “We need to adapt the method so that the Arabs, the Europeans, the Americans can accompany things,” he said in Cairo, according to Reuters. Fabius warned that inaction could set the region “ablaze.” Over the weekend, a Palestinian gunman shot and killed an Israeli hiking in the West Bank, and another Palestinian stabbed a Border Patrol soldier in the Old City of Jerusalem. The French have been circulating drafts of a resolution they are considering submitting to the U.N. Security Council that calls for peace talks to start immediately and sets a deadline of two years for negotiations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday called the French initiative a “dictate” that makes “no real reference to Israel’s security needs.” “Peace will only come from direct negotiations between the parties without preconditions,” Netanyahu said. “It will not come from U.N. resolutions that are sought to be imposed from the outside.” The French draft resolution generally endorses the U.S. position of “two states for two peoples living beside each other in peace and security,” and it calls for negotiations on future borders based on the 1967 armistice line with mutually agreed-upon land swaps that would likely allow Israel to keep many of the Jewish settlements built in the West Bank. Details about French positions on the division of Jerusalem and what would happen to Palestinian refugees were not disclosed. U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry spoke by phone with Fabius on Thursday, before Fabius left for Israel. State Department spokesman John Kirby did not say whether they had discussed the French proposal, however, and reiterated the long-standing U.S. position. “Both Secretary Kerry and Foreign Minister Fabius share a sense of importance about the Middle East peace process,” Kirby said, in a statement released Sunday. “From our perspective nothing has changed about our policy of favoring a two-state solution with agreements that are worked out between the two parties.” The Israeli prime minister was not enthusiastic. “They are trying to push us to borders that aren’t subject to protection while completely ignoring what will be on the other side of the border,” Netanyahu said, referring to Israel’s insistence that it cannot give up land, at least now, because the minute Israel withdraws from the West Bank, the Islamist militant movement Hamas will take control. The last round of U.S.-led peace talks here collapsed last year with a round of bitter recriminations on all sides. At a news conference Sunday evening, Fabius said that it was not France’s intent to elbow the Americans away from the peace table. Quite the contrary: He called such a suggestion a fiction. “The French position is that the United States has played and will play a very substantial role in the Israeli-Palestinian question,” Fabius said. The French foreign minister said there was no reason for France to submit resolutions to the U.N. Security Council that would not pass, and his aides said Fabius was working with his counterparts to craft language that could be supported — or at least not vetoed — by the United States and that could garner Arab backing as well. Asked how his talks with Netanyahu went, Fabius said, “Prime Minister Netanyahu told me he wants negotiations, and no, this is not a joke.” Carol Morello in Washington contributed to this report. 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