Kerry Possibly Returning to Mideast with Proposal in-Hand

If US Secretary of State John Kerry is, as rumored, returning to the Middle East next week for a fifth shot at getting the Israelis and Palestinians back to the bargaining table, he should come with his long promised proposals in-hand according to the Palestinian Authority. A member of the Palestinian negotiating team told Palestinian radio that “The timeframe has come to an end” and that when Kerry meets with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, presumably next week, Abbas will decide “whether [the proposals] meet a minimum of the Palestinians’ demands.” When Kerry took office, he immediately singled out ending the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate as a personal goal. The SecState said he would spend two months assessing the landscape and then submit his own proposals for jumpstarting the peace talks. Observers note somewhat pessimistically that the Palestinian rhetoric remains fixed on assessing whether Kerry has managed to get Israel to agree to its pre-conditions rather than focusing on returning to the table. Regarding the key demand that Israel freeze all building in its communities located on land it acquired in the 1967 war, the Israeli Housing Minister Uri Ariel told Israel army radio on Tuesday that, "In Jerusalem since the beginning of the year there have been no marketing at all, except for one (in west Jerusalem), the same to Judea and Samaria," the biblical name for the West Bank. Ariel was responding to comments by another minister in the Netanyahu government who had opened a hornets’ nest when he called for his government to “build, build, build” on post-1967 lands. Economic Minister Naftali Bennett also said that the idea of a Palestinian state “had reached a dead end.”