The responsibility for a failure to restart stalled Israeli-Palestinian talks will lie solely with Tel Aviv and its refusal to halt settlement construction, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas said on Sunday in Moscow.
“If Palestinian-Israeli negotiations end in a fiasco, the blame for this will be Israel’s alone,” Abbas told journalists at a brief news conference after a meeting with Russia’s chief mufti, Rawil Gaynetdin.
“We are committed to a continuation of talks…but the settlement policies of Israel prevent this,” Abaas said, adding that settler violence was continuing. “Five mosques were recently burnt down in the West Bank.”
Talks collapsed in September 2010 over disagreements on Israeli construction of settlements in the West Bank, where the Palestinians are seeking to found a state. Israel has so far shown little willingness to compromise, despite international pressure.
Palestinian leaders are pushing for full membership at the United Nations, but the United States says the Palestinians must reach a peace agreement with Israel first.
Abbas arrived on Thursday on a six-day visit to Russia, one of the members of the so-called Quartet on Middle East peace. The other members are the United States, the United Nations and the European Union.
The visit is part of a European tour to drum up more support for the Palestinians’ stance on settlements as attempts to revive full talks flounder. Exploratory discussions in Jordan on January 14 ended unsuccessfully.
President Dmitry Medvedev reconfirmed Russia’s support for an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital during a meeting with Abbas on Friday.
“Our relations remain on an excellent level,” Medvedev said. “Russian-Palestinian friendship…stretches back not decades but centuries.”
Russia has consistently called for a freeze on new settlement construction by Israel.
The Kremlin’s commitment to an independent Palestinian state dates back to the Soviet era, although its influence in the region has waned considerably since then. But Moscow also enjoys both political and cultural ties with Israel, which is home to a massive Russian-speaking diaspora.
The Palestinian leader has enjoyed a warm welcome in Russia. On Saturday, he was honored by the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, as a “guardian of Christian values in the Middle East”
Abbas flew into in Russia after briefer visits to both Germany and the U.K., where British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg hit out at Israel’s settlement policies, calling them the “deliberate vandalism” of efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said after her meeting with Abbas that it was "very important that we see progress, that each side sees that goodwill is there."
Both parties to the fragile talks agree on the ultimate goal of a "two-state solution" to the decade-long conflict. But deep differences remain over borders, the fate of refuges and other issues.
Israel wants talks to begin with no preconditions and says Abbas failed to talk advantage of a partial, ten-month moratorium on settlements, which expired last September.
The Quartet wants the sides to announce their positions on borders and security arrangements for a two-state solution by January 26.
