RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — The Palestinian president will invite Israeli politicians to the West Bank to try to make sure peacemaking is on the new government's agenda, a senior official said Thursday, even as a top Israeli hard-liner proposed sidelining the polarizing issue.
Hoping to capitalize on the unexpected strength of moderates in Israel's incoming parliament,
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wants to sit down with representatives of Israeli parliamentary factions to discuss the possibility of settling the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict peacefully, senior Palestinian official
Yasser Abed Rabbo told The Associated Press.
"We invite the
Israeli parties, particularly the new ones, for dialogue on future accords,"
Abed Rabbo said.
He did not say when the invitations would go out, but emphasized that
Abbas wanted the meeting to take place before Israel forms its next
government — a process that is expected to take several weeks.
Tuesday's parliamentary vote ended in a surprise deadlock between a
hawkish, religious bloc and a camp of centrist, secular and Arab
parties. While
Benjamin Netanyahu,
as head of the largest single party in parliament, appears set to
remain prime minister, he can't put together a stable coalition without
drawing in moderates beyond his traditional hardline and religious base.
He has already extended his hand to a new centrist party that advocates more serious efforts to end the decades-old
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Peace talks reached an impasse before
Netanyahu
came into office four years ago and never resumed in earnest. The main
obstacle during his tenure has been continued construction of Jewish
settlements in areas captured in the 1967 war, the West Bank and east
Jerusalem. Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005 but still
controls access by land, sea and air.
Abed Rabbo
said the Palestinians have not dropped two longstanding conditions for
negotiations — Israel must stop settlement building and the contours of
the
Palestinian state must be negotiated on the basis of the borders Israel held before 1967.
While opinion polls indicate a majority of Israelis back the establishment of a
Palestinian state
alongside Israel, peacemaking was barely mentioned as a campaign issue,
reflecting widespread doubts that peace is possible after decades of
violence and stop-and-go talks.
Still, the election's outcome defied forecasts that
Netanyahu and his allies would steer a
government with an even more hard-line makeup.
Instead, his top partner is likely to be Yesh Atid, a new party with
moderate views on peacemaking that has emerged as Israel's new power
broker.
Yesh Atid's leader, political newcomer Yair Lapid, has said he will not sit in a
government
that is not seriously pursuing peace with the Palestinians. But the
focus of his campaign has been mostly on helping the needs of Israel's
struggling middle class, raising questions about how hard he will push
on the peace issue.
Lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman, a
Netanyahu ally, told Israel Radio on Thursday that the next
government must focus on domestic issues rather than peacemaking to avoid political paralysis, given lawmakers' sharply divergent views.
"If we want to founder from the outset, and embark upon endless
internal struggles, then make foreign policy the top priority," he said.
"If we want the
government
to be effective and accomplish things, and leave a strong, significant
imprint, I think everyone understands the need for domestic changes is
dramatic, and that is the order of the day. So leave the foreign issues
aside," he said.
Netanyahu has hinted that is the direction he is going in through the
two brief statements he has given since the election results came in
late Tuesday. Both statements have focused on the need to build a broad
coalition to address pressing domestic issues.
Lieberman's ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party teamed up on a joint list with
Netanyahu's Likud for Tuesday's election.
