2010-07-31 09:20:48
WAM Dubai, 31st July 2010 (WAM) -- The Israelis should not expect the Palestinians to abandon past agreements, a UAE paper commented today.

''Attaining peace in the Middle East is a challenging task to say the least. There is no chance of success without the full commitment and involvement of all the parties concerned and even then achieving a just and lasting peace will be extremely difficult,'' wrote the Gulf News in its editorial today titled '' Peace process can't start from scratch''.

''There have recently been numerous attempts to revive peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly called for direct talks with the Palestinians to resume. The Israelis have criticised the Palestinians for not being supportive of such a call. "The Palestinians have set three impossible conditions: that the negotiations start from the point they left off at the end of 2008 when Ehud Olmert was prime minister, that they be based on a total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and that the freeze of [colony] construction continue," said Vice-Prime Minister Silvan Shalom, the paper remarked.

The Palestinians' demands, the Gulf News added, are reasonable and legitimate as they fall within the parameters of what has governed the peace process up until today. Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat has rightly said that, "These are not Palestinian conditions, they are Israeli obligations which must be met". Such an argument is well established as the peace process is not viable if one party is always demanding compromise while the other is forced to make concessions.

''If there is to be any light at the end of the tunnel, certain minimum requirements must be met. For one thing, the process has to include all the concerned parties and not exclude any group. In addition, the process must return to what was agreed upon long ago, when the Arab peace initiative was first introduced and endorsed on a wide scale, it concluded.

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