Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today announced that President Barack Obama will convene Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Washington Sept. 2 to kick off 12 months of negotiations aimed at producing the long-sought two-state solution.
The aim is "to relaunch direct negotiations to resolve all final-status issues, which we believe can be completed within one year," Clinton said.
Obama also invited President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Jordanian King Abdullah, and he plans to meet with each of the four leaders separately before having them all to dinner at the White House.
The next day Clinton will meet with Netanyahu and Abbas at the State Department to begin the hard work of finding compromises on issues that have defeated so many previous attempts at comprehensive peace for the Middle East.
They include the status of Jerusalem -- claimed as both the Israeli and Palestinian capitals -- the Netanyahu government's persistent support for new settlements in the West Bank and Abbas's de facto inability to make any solid security promises for Hamas, the unrepentant militant and political group that runs Gaza and whose official policy seeks an end to Israel.
"There have been difficulties in the past; there will be difficulties ahead," Clinton acknowledged. "Without a doubt, we will hit more obstacles. The enemies of peace will keep trying to defeat us and to derail these talks. But I ask the parties to persevere, to keep moving forward even through difficult times and to continue working to achieve a just and lasting peace in the region."
It wasn't clear whether there was a connection between the peace-talks resumption and the U.S.-Israeli consultations on Iran, but until recently Israeli fears about a potential Iranian bomb were the dominant issue between Washington and Jerusalem.
U.S. officials tell The New York Times they shared evidence of problems inside the Iranian nuclear program with Israeli counterparts, and that they believe their analysis has diminished the chances that Israel will feel threatened enough to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iranian nuclear targets during the next 12 months.
A series of moves by Iran's nuclear program this year has led U.S. and international officials to suspect that Tehran could be accelerating the creation of atomic weaponry by perfecting the enrichment, or purification, of uranium and building a stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could quickly be processed to weapons-grade quality. Fears about such a "breakout" scenario were stoked by a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency in February suggesting Iran could be working on "a nuclear payload for a missile," and by an ambitious announcement in Tehran last month promising a faster pace of enrichment.
Atta Kenare, AFP / Getty Images
The reactor building at the Bushehr nuclear power plant is pictured in southern Iran.
"We think that they have roughly a year dash time," Gary Samore, the top adviser on nuclear issues for President Barack Obama, told the Times. "A year is a very long period of time."
News of the American reassurance of Israel comes ahead of the scheduled introduction on Saturday of Russian fuel into the Bushehr nuclear reactor, a power plant that Iran has been trying to push into operations for decades.
But Bushehr will be operating under the tight scrutiny of IAEA inspectors, unlike some other Iranian nuclear facilities, and the Russian supply of fuel comes with the condition that Iran return the fuel once it has been processed. Moreover, Bushehr will be using plutonium rather than uranium.
The U.S. objects to Russia's cooperation with Iran at Bushehr at a time when Washington and allied governments in Europe are trying to pressure Tehran to stop enriching uranium. The U.N. Security Council approved new sanctions against Iran in June, and the U.S. and European Union have added additional penalties since then.
The political and economic effects of sanctions in Iran may be part of what has delayed the enrichment program, the Times reports. The sanctions have made it difficult to obtain components for the centrifuges that spin uranium gas fast enough to purify it, though poor centrifuge design and Western sabotage may also be to blame for the setbacks.
Iran denies it plans to acquire nuclear weapons. It says its nuclear program is for civilian use.