JERUSALEM: Yitzhak Molcho, Israel’s point man at the new Middle East talks, is a lawyer who shuns the limelight but has experience negotiating with the Palestinians on behalf of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his longtime friend.
Netanyahu himself will lead the negotiations with the Palestinians that kick off in Washington on Thursday, but Molcho will head a "small professional team" at the talks, according to the prime minister’s office.
The team includes officials from the military and the foreign and defense ministries, while experts on issues such as water can be called in as needed.
"This is a small professional team which will work in a serious and collaborative manner and with the utmost discretion," Netanyahu said in the statement.
The 65-year-old Molcho, who generally stays well behind the scenes, is a close friend of Bibi — as the prime minister is known in Israel — and his trusted go-between with the Palestinians.
"He was Bibi’s private attorney. More importantly he was his lifelong friend… As the only person Bibi trusted completely, he had become Bibi’s negotiator," former US Middle East envoy Dennis Ross wrote in his book, "The Missing Peace."
Ross noted that Molcho was not a member of Netanyahu’s hawkish Likud party and that his political instincts were centre-left, but "he was probably the only one around Bibi who could tell him whatever he did not want to hear."
According to local political commentators, Molcho and then-foreign policy adviser Dore Gold became in 1996 the first Netanyahu envoys to meet the late iconic leader of the Palestinians, Yasser Arafat.
"He has experience negotiating with the Palestinians on behalf of Netanyahu so he is not an unknown, and I have never heard the Palestinians object to talking to him," political analyst Yossi Alpher told AFP. "I have heard he is a very personable person."
The Jerusalem Post said that National Security Advisor Uzi Arad, a hawkish foreign policy expert and former executive in the Mossad spy agency, is also expected to be on the team.
Firebrand Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has advised low expectations for negotiations, will not be part of the team but has agreed to be represented by the Middle East section chief at the foreign ministry, Yaakov Hadas, and legal counsel Daniel Taub, according to the premier’s office.
