Israel: Abbas 'Prefers Unilateral Moves to Peace Talks'

Israel's deputy foreign minister on Wednesday accused Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas of seeking "unilateral" moves to seek statehood at the expense of direct peace talks.

Abbas "is in no hurry to restart negotiations, despite the pressures on him, because he thinks that the unilateral path will get him further and that way he won't have to pay a political price," Zeev Elkin said on public radio.

Elkin's comments came just days before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry returns to the region for his fifth visit in just over four months in a bid to coax the parties into resuming direct talks which collapsed in September 2010.

They were echoed later Wednesday when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in a parliamentary debate about changes in an Arab League peace initiative that would allow Israel and the Palestinians to trade territory in a final peace deal.

"We listen to any initiative," Netanyahu told MPs. "We are prepared to discuss initiatives which are suggestions and not dictates."

"Israel is not the party evading negotiations, which places obstacles to entering negotiations," he said.

"I call on Abu Mazen to withdraw now his preconditions and come and talk," Netanyahu said, using the name under which Abbas is familiarly known in Arabic.

"Give peace a chance," he said, switching from Hebrew to English.

The remarks came as Israel and the Palestinians separately marked 46 years since the start of the Six-Day War when Israeli forces seized Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem, with the Palestinians mourning it as the "naksa" or setback.

The Palestinians in November successfully applied for upgraded U.N. status as a non-member state in a move sharply denounced by Israel and Washington as a "unilateral" move, with both insisting a Palestinian state can only arise out of two-way negotiations.

Elkin, a hawkish member of Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party, also reaffirmed Israel's refusal to return to the lines which existed before the 1967 war.

"The people of Israel are not ready to commit suicide and make the same mistake they made when they pulled out of the Gaza Strip (in 2005)," he said, referring to the subsequent takeover of the territory by Islamist movement Hamas and the rockets which have since been aimed at southern Israel.

A similar stance was expressed on Tuesday by Yoram Cohen, head of the Shin Bet domestic security agency, in a meeting with MPs at the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs and defense.

According to Maariv newspaper, Cohen said Abbas did not think he could gain anything from entering talks because the starting point of the current Israeli government was nowhere near what he had been discussing with former premier Ehud Olmert.

"Abu Mazen (Abbas) always carries with him the promises of the former (leaders), and is unable to adjust to the reality of the current ones," an MP at the meeting quoted him as saying.

Olmert, who was in power between 2006 and 2009, reportedly offered Abbas around 93 percent of the Palestinian territories during talks in 2008, and proposed a mutual land swap for the remaining 6.3 percent that would permit Israel to keep the major settlement blocs.

The proposal was more or less along the 1967 lines, but Abbas turned it down, telling the Washington Post in 2009 that the offer was insufficient: "The gaps were wide," he said.

Kerry has been trying to draw the parties back into direct negotiations, but on Monday warned that Israel could be facing its last chance to secure a peace deal.

Until now, the Palestinian leadership has said it will only return to negotiations if Israel stops building on land it wants for a future state and if the Jewish state agrees to negotiate on the basis of the pre-1967 lines.