Monday, October 4, 2010

"More ill-fated negotiations? Netanyahu has said unequivocally that Israel "will never withdraw from the Golan,"



 
"... There hasn't yet been any response from the Israeli government to the news out of this weekend's Syria-Turkey meeting, but don't expect any encouragement.
It's worth adding some additional pessimism to all of this. Even when the Turkish mediated negotiations were going well, the closest Damascus and Tel Aviv ever came to success was nearing an agreement to sit down for direct talks. Once that happened, who knows how far those negotiations would have gone, but probably not far. Syria remains, at least rhetorically, committed to getting the Golan Heights back from Israel, which has been occupying the territory since 1967. Netanyahu has said unequivocally that Israel "will never withdraw from the Golan," as has his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman.
With Israeli-Palestinian peace talks on the precipice of collapse after only a month, it's hard to imagine why anyone else in the region would choose to sign up for more ill-fated negotiations."

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