WELLINGTON: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday she plans to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the United States next week in a bid to keep the Middle East peace talks alive.
Speaking on a visit to New Zealand, Clinton added she believed the talks that began in September would continue despite Palestinian threats to quit them over Israel’s refusal to halt settlement building in the West Bank.
"I do intend to see Prime Minister Netanyahu when he is in the United States next week," Clinton told reporters in the New Zealand capital of Wellington, near the end of her two-week tour of Asian countries.
Netanyahu said he would fly to the United States this coming weekend for talks on the Middle East peace process and to speak of the need to combat international terrorism.
But Netanyahu will not be meeting US President Barack Obama, who will be traveling in Asia at the time.
Clinton said details of her planned meeting with Netanyahu were still being worked out.
"I want to reiterate that we are working on a non-stop basis with our Israeli and Palestinian friends to design a way forward in the negotiations," the chief US diplomat said.
"I’m convinced that both (Israeli and Palestinian) leaders… are committed to pursuing the two-state solution and it is clear that that can only be achieved through negotiations," she said.
"So I am very involved in finding the way forward and I think that we will be able to do so," she said.
Israel and the Palestinians resumed direct peace negotiations on September 2, after a 20-month hiatus.
But within weeks the talks ran aground following the expiry of a 10-month Israeli moratorium on the building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu’s visit coincides with the end of a one-month deadline that Arab leaders gave the United States to persuade Israel to renew the settlement moratorium.
Netanyahu has steadfastly refused to reimpose the ban; while Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has declined to talk while Israel builds on land he wants for a future state, prompting intense US efforts to resolve the deadlock.
The Israeli premier’s trip to the United States will take place just days after Tuesday’s midterm elections where Republicans captured the House of Representatives and slashed Democratic majorities in the Senate.
Analysts consulted by AFP in Jerusalem have predicted that a weakening of Obama’s Democratic Party in the congressional elections would make Netanyahu more resistant to demands for a new freeze on Jewish settlements.
Clinton’s spokesman Philip Crowley, speaking before the results were known, said the peace process would be unaffected regardless of the outcome.
"Foreign policy in the United States is bipartisan most of the time," Crowley said. "It is in pursuit of our national interests which don’t change administration by administration or election by election."
