Global General
Clinton to attend Mideast session amid crisis
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-03-18 08:46
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WASHINGTON - With the Mideast peace process stalled and US-Israeli relations in crisis, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton headed Wednesday to a Mideast strategy meeting of top international diplomats.
 A Palestinian man works on a construction site for a new home in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo, Tuesday, March 16, 2010. [Agencies] |
As originally conceived, the meeting in Moscow of the so-called Quartet group of peacemakers - the US, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations was intended to lend support for the start this week of indirect talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. But those talks fell apart before they began a casualty of Israel's provocative approval of new housing in east Jerusalem.
Clinton also will use her Moscow visit to discuss another high foreign policy priority of the Obama administration: arms control. The US and Russia are said to be close to concluding a follow to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expired in December, but the final bargaining has been rocky.
The Quartet group is to meet over dinner Thursday, followed by formal talks on Friday. Joining Clinton will be Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, and the Quartet's special representative, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The group is meant to represent an international consensus on the importance of pressing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and a commitment to establishing a Palestinian state as part of that process.
Michele D. Dunne, a Mideast expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Tuesday that the Quartet might back US-initiated demands of Israel, including that it reverse the east Jerusalem housing decision and make a gesture to the Palestinians. But she saw little chance of it working.
"To say that you have to rescind approval for this construction in east Jerusalem is very unusual for the United States to go that far," she said. "And I don't think Netanyahu will do it." She was referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is due to visit Washington next week.
In remarks at the State Department on Tuesday, Clinton spoke hopefully of getting the peace talks back on track.
"There is just too much at stake for both the Palestinians and the Israelis," for them not to resume bargaining, she said. Negotiations broke off in late 2008 with Israel's incursion into Hamas-ruled Gaza.
George Mitchell, the Obama administration's special envoy for Mideast peace, was supposed to have been shuttling between the Israelis and Palestinians this week, prior to joining Clinton in Moscow on Thursday. But he canceled his Mideast visit as the administration awaited word from Netanyahu on whether he would reverse last week's housing decision and take other steps to reassure Washington and the Palestinians.
