PM: Abbas’s hard-line speech shows he won’t take tough decisions

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s hawkish statements over the weekend show that he is not ready to make the decisions necessary to continue talks with Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told US Vice President Joe Biden Monday night.

The two leaders met for about four hours Monday night in a working dinner following former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s funeral in southern Israel earlier in the day.

During their discussion, Netanyahu said Abbas’s comments to Palestinians from East Jerusalem on Saturday, voicing hard-line opinions about a number of matters on the negotiating table, showed he wasn’t ready to make tough decisions.

A US official briefing reporters aboard Biden’s plane en route back to Washington said the two held a “strategic conversation” on peace talks, but did not delve into particulars, Reuters reported. Biden also told Netanyahu that continued settlement building is “not constructive.”

Abbas said Saturday that that no peace agreement would be possible without East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. He also refused to recognize Israel’s self-definition as the state of the Jewish people, a principle endorsed on Sunday by Arab foreign ministers. But while those two positions were not new, his tougher line on the refugee issue was.

“Let me put it simply: the right of return is a personal decision. What does this mean? That neither the PA, nor the state, nor the PLO, nor Abu-Mazen [Abbas], nor any Palestinian or Arab leader has the right to deprive someone from his right to return,” Abbas said.

Abbas’s comments came deep into the restarted American-moderated negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians which began in July and which are set to continue until April.

During the dinner, Biden also assured Netanyahu that the US is committed to protecting the “sanctions architecture” against Iran, an official said, according to the Reuters report.

However, he said the Obama administration would block congressional efforts to levy new penalties on Tehran.

On Sunday, the sides announced that they had agreed on a date for implementing a six-month interim nuclear deal signed in November, which will ease Western sanctions in exchange for curbs on nuclear enrichment and wider oversight .

Obama told reporters Monday that the agreement, “allows us to have the time and space” to negotiate a longer term deal. Israel has lobbied against the deal and for sanctions to remain in place.

The working dinner ended after midnight early Tuesday morning and Biden returned to the US immediately following the meeting.

Earlier in the day, Biden told President Shimon Peres that even as unrest shakes the wider Middle East, “the one place where there is a possibility for an island of stability … is between the Palestinian people and the Israeli people in two secure states, respecting one another’s sovereignty and security.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report