Itongadol/AJN.- Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as the Jewish homeland, a precondition for a two-state solution set by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, thought to be holding up progress.
Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will likely require more time than previously anticipated, US officials acknowledged to The Jerusalem Post on Monday, as a nine-month deadline for peace talks set last July by US Secretary of State John Kerry is on the verge of expiring.
Kerry and his team have suggested publishing a framework for negotiations going forward that the parties would collectively roll out before the deadline, set in April. But the Americans now view the hard date they originally set out to be "artificial," and suggest that even the framework may need more time, given some important gaps that still remain.
One of those gaps is Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas\’ refusal to recognize Israel as the Jewish homeland, a precondition for a two-state solution set by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Abbas told The New York Times over the weekend that he would refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
The "timeframe wiggling" comes as both sides of the conflict have tested the waters by strategic leaking certain proposals— the presence of NATO troops in a future Palestine, and the habitation of Israeli settlers under official Palestinian control— to mixed results. Both Abbas and Netanyahu face political backlash should those proposals be included in a final framework, much less the Jewish nature of Israel, or the status of Jerusalem.