NEWS OF THE MİDLEAST
Kerry Says U.S. to Review its Role in Mideast Talks
RABAT, Morocco — Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that the Obama administration planned to re-evaluate its approach to Middle East peacemaking and decide whether it was worth continuing its effort in light of the inability of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to make progress.
In response to a question while visiting Morocco, Mr. Kerry said that he would return to Washington to confer with President Obama before deciding on next steps. He said it was “reality check time.”
“There are limits to the amount of time and effort that the United States can spend if the parties themselves are unwilling to take constructive steps in order to be able to move forward,” he said.
“We intend to evaluate,” he added. “Both sides say they want to continue. Neither party has said they have called it off. But we are not going to sit there indefinitely. It is not an open-ended effort.”
and the Palestinian Authority have been at odds in recent days over Israel’s refusal to release a batch of Palestinian prisoners and over the Palestinian Authority’s use of its applications to join a number of international organizations as leverage in the talks. Neither side informed the Americans before taking the steps, officials said.
Some critics have asserted that Mr. Kerry has devoted too much attention to pursuing Middle East peace at the expense of other pressing foreign policy issues.
Mr. Kerry defended his efforts, saying the nearly nine months he has spent trying to encourage serious talks was not wasted because the parties have narrowed their differences on some divisive matters.
But he acknowledged that the United States faced an array of foreign policy challenges, ticking off Ukraine, Iran and Syria
“We have an enormous amount on the plate,” he said.
Yair Lapid, the centrist Israeli finance minister, said Friday that the events of the past day “raised serious doubts” about whether Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, was really interested in reaching an agreement. He was referring to a broad new list of demands that the Palestinian news agency Maan said on Thursday was being presented by Palestinian negotiators as a condition for extending the talks.
“It looks more like a deliberate provocation aimed at blowing up the talks,” Mr. Lapid, whose Yesh Atid Party has backed the negotiations, wrote on his Facebook page. “No Israeli will conduct negotiations at any price.”
Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli general serving as a consultant to the negotiations, said Friday that Mr. Abbas’s international gambit “pushed us into a deep crisis.”
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