At a press briefing today following trilateral talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Middle East Envoy George Mitchell dodged several questions about the administration’s position on an Israeli settlement freeze.
Mitchell attended the meeting with President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and shared notes with reporters before taking questions.
One asked if the administration had pushed Israel on a settlement freeze. Mitchell responded that the freeze “was discussed in all of the meetings,” but quickly emphasized that Obama was pushing for the re-launch of negotiations.
Reporters took this to mean that the administration was backing off demands for a settlement freeze, and asked more questions to that effect, to which Mitchell responded that there’s been no change in position.
The questions persisted, and Mitchell finally tried to stop them:
With the greatest of respect, I do not share your characterization of what we have done. It may be the case that the public reports have emphasized that area at the expense of others, but we have been very clear from the beginning, first, that there is a wide range of issues, and we have made significant progress on those issues, and that they were all directed to a single point, and that was a re-launch of negotiations.
I’ll just tell you a story to tell you how I’m feeling right now. When I was Senate majority leader, we had a long and contentious series of debates and actions on a major issue, and we had resolved what I thought were most of the issues; there will still differences. And lo and behold, a big article appeared, I think it was in The Washington Post, which, wouldn’t you know it, highlighted the differences, and proclaimed it a failure.
And I asked the reporter, in a polite but complaining way … He said, Senator, you will never see a headline that says “Two million commuters made it safely to work today. But if one car crashes and a couple of people are killed, that will be the headline.” He said, “That’s the way the world works.” And I accept that’s the way the world works. But the emphasis which you describe has not come from us. We have emphasized — I have repeatedly said our objective is to re-launch negotiations.
Someone ventured another question, this time whether negotiations could begin without the settlement issue being settled.
“We are not identifying any issue as being a precondition or an impediment to negotiation,” Mitchell said. “Neither the President, nor the Secretary, nor I have ever said of any one issue, that or any other, that it is a precondition to negotiations. … We do not believe in preconditions. We do not impose them. And we urge others not to impose preconditions.”
