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Israel says French peace initiative "doomed to fail"

Xinhua, June 3, 2016 Adjust font size:

A French initiative to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians is "doomed to fail," Israel's head of the Foreign Ministry said here Thursday, comparing it to the colonial 1916 deal that shaped the boundaries of the Middle East.

"The effort utterly failed then and will completely fail today," the Foreign Ministry's director-general Dore Gold told reporters on the eve of a meeting of foreign ministers in Paris to set up the groundwork for a peace conference later this year.

Gold referred to the Sykes-Picot agreement between colonial Britain and France that drew up the borders of the Middle East upon the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1916.

"The only way to get a stable regional arrangement that will allow us to create true peace is if parties in the Middle East come to understandings between them," the diplomat said.

"We believe the Arab states would give backing to direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians," he added.

Foreign ministers from around the world will convene in Paris on Friday to discuss how to get a peace conference in Paris going by next fall. Friday's meeting will not include representatives from Israel or the Palestinians.

On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the French efforts to organize a peace summit, saying peace is not achieved with international conferences.

"The way to peace does not go through international conferences that seek to impose agreements, make the Palestinians' demands more extreme and thereby make peace more remote," Netanyahu said, according to a statement from his office.

French officials announced the initiative in January, to the ire of Israeli official and the support of Palestinian leaders.

On Monday, following the swearing-in of hawkish lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman as Defense Minister, he and Netanyahu both said they support the two-state solution, with Lieberman lauding a speech recently made by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on the need to resume talks with the involvement of Arab states in the region, including Egypt, based on the 2002 Saudi Arabia peace initiative.

The proposal says that in exchange for peace between the two sides, other Arab countries would normalize their ties with Israel.

Israel occupied the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip territories in the 1967 Middle East War. The last round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians took place between July 2013 and April 2014 with the mediation of the U.S., but ended abruptly without results.

International calls to restart peace talks come amid an ongoing wave of violence which started in October and claimed the lives of 28 Israelis and 205 Palestinians. Endit