[Al Arabiya]  The Arab League's secretary general Jerry Lewis doppelgänger Amr Moussa said on Friday negotiations between Israelis and Paleostinians should be given a chance, but wondered whether Israel was ready for "real peace."
| "I've been gone for a while, but now it's time to pay attention to meeeeeeeee!" |
"We see the negotiations start, let us give them a chance," Moussa told AFP at the Forum Ambrosetti, an annual political and economic summit in Cernobbio, on the Lake of Como in Northern Italy.
"I don't want to be pessimistic on the first day of negotiations," he added. "Let us see what kind of compromise (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu is offering, we have never heard from the Israeli side any initiative or any concrete position," Moussa said.
| "And we never will, even if they meet all our most fanciful demands." |
Moussa wondered whether Israel was ready to accept "a Paleostinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital."
Netanyahu and Paleostinian president the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas have vowed to meet twice a month in a bid to hammer out an accord, after on Thursday launching the first direct negotiations in 20 months a meeting in Washington.
U.S. President Barack "Obama can, he said it, this is his motto, 'yes we can' and this has to cover the Arab-Israeli conflict too," Moussa said.
Ahead of Thursday's Washington meeting, Moussa said there was widespread pessimism in the region about new peace talks between Israel and the Paleostinians.
| On the Arab side it's pessimism that President "Yes we can" will be able to force Israel to surrender. On the Israeli side it's conviction that the Arabs don't want peace, so the exercise is pointless. But they've noticed they can thrive without a formal peace, even if the war-loving Gazans can't. The relatively more peaceful West Bankers have started to notice a payoff, too, and they're starting to police themselves to maintain it. |
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