The diplomatic wrangling occurred against a backdrop of pageantry and speechmaking at the U.N. General Assembly, including an incendiary address by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian leader triggered a mass exodus from the U.N. chamber after he suggested that larger conspiracies were behind the Nazi Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The search for a breakthrough on Middle East peace talks came on the eve of a scheduled speech by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in which he is expected to petition the U.N. Security Council to grant membership to a Palestinian state. The move is opposed by Israel and by the Obama administration, which has argued that a statehood bid could hinder the resumption of direct negotiations to resolve the conflict.
Obama administration officials, acknowledging fading hopes for stopping Abbas from proceeding with the membership bid, said the chief concern now is to prevent the Palestinian initiative from driving the two sides further part — and perhaps crushing any hopes for a peace deal in the foreseeable future.
“Regardless of what happens tomorrow in the United Nations, we remain focused on the day after,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters during a news conference with Tunisian Foreign Minister Mouldi Kefi.
Clinton, who met separately with Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu late Wednesday, said both leaders expressed a commitment to resuming direct negotiations to resolve the conflict’s most vexing issues, including final borders, the right claimed by Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to what is now Israel, and the status of Jerusalem.
Yet it remained unclear whether the two sides could overcome the deep distrust that has stalled negotiations for more than a year and reach agreement on a Palestinian request that Israel cease building settlements in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu imposed a temporary moratorium on settlements last year at some political risk, but when it was not extended, negotiations collapsed.
“They both recognize that there has to be a resolution of the outstanding issues to produce a functioning Palestinian state,” Clinton said. She added: “We will leave no effort or stone unturned in our commitment to achieving that.”
Talks among members of the Quartet of Mideast peace mediators — the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — ended late Thursday, but there was sufficient progress that a new round of discussions was scheduled for early Friday, just ahead of Abbas’s speech, a senior administration official told reporters.
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