BICOM

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said yesterday that he would be ready to resume peace negotiations with Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed any positive steps. “If there is anything promising or positive of course we will engage,” he said.

Abbas refused to discuss the surprise announcement Tuesday of a unity government in Israel, saying only that it was too early to comment. Abbas also told Reuters that he had no intention of allowing his people to take up arms against Israel, but that he was ready to renew a unilateral push for Palestinian statehood at the UN if talks with Israel do not progress. “If nothing happens, at that time we will go to the United Nations to get non-member status,” he said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh laid out the positive step Israel’s incoming unity government must take in order for negotiations to commence in a statement on the official Palestinian Wafa news agency yesterday. “This is the right time for the Israeli government to reach peace with the Palestinian people by immediately accepting the requirements of the peace process,” he said. “This demands an immediate halt to settlement activities in all the Palestinian territories,” he concluded.

Kadima chairman Shaul Mofaz has indicated that resuming the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations was an “iron condition” of his decision to join Netanyahu’s government. Speaking to journalists on a BICOM conference call, Kadima MK Yochanan Plesner said that his party had secured an agreement with Netanyahu to “reignite the peace process” with the Palestinians, and would counterbalance the right wing parties in the coalition that had constrained Netanyahu before now. Though he acknowledged that this element of the agreement was more ambiguous and open to interpretation.

Also yesterday, following the announcement of an Israeli unity government, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Washington would make no change to its approach towards Jerusalem. “A new coalition in Israel will certainly not affect our policy approach, and we continue to have very good relations with leaders in Israel… we provide significant support for and coordination with Israel’s military on security interests,” Carney told reporters.