Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams opened talks with U.S. officials in the Washington area late Tuesday, another effort to end three months of violence and revive an all-but-dead peace process.
President Clinton was due to meet with the Israeli negotiating team on Wednesday evening, according to Israeli media reports. He may also meet with the Palestinian representatives.
Washington's Middle East envoy Dennis Ross held separate meetings with the two delegations on Tuesday. However, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians were particularly upbeat about the prospects for ending the bloodshed or getting talks back on track.
"We don't have very high expectations, but we do think that if we have a chance, we have to try and exploit it now," said Israeli negotiator Gilead Sher.
"To be honest, I do not have high expectations," said senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.
In the Middle East, many Palestinians have opposed the idea of resuming talks with Israel and ending the uprising.
"Our goals are clear: the intifada goes on," Palestinian cabinet minister Nabil Shaath said in an Arabic radio interview, referring to the uprising. "We have changed the rules of the game, created a new situation, by our heroism and our sacrifices for the sake of the homeland," he added.
On Tuesday, Palestinians heeded a call for a half-day strike called by militant organizations to protest the resumption of negotiations. In a leaflet, Arafat's Fatah organization, Hamas and other PLO factions also called for another "Day of Rage" on Friday, the last Friday of the Muslim fast month of Ramadan.
Previous "Days of Rage" have inevitably ended in deaths.
Although clashes and terrorism have brought the death toll to more than 330, during the last three months, the positions of the two sides have not changed since the peace process started to crumble at the end of the Camp David summit in the summer.
Erekat has said that the Palestinian demands remain the same: a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 ceasefire line between Israel and Egypt in the Gaza Strip and Israel and Jordan on the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem and the Old City with its holy places; as well as the "right of return" for Palestinians who left Israel during past wars, and their families.
Israel has long argued that U.N. resolution 242, which forms the basis for the Palestinian demand that Israel withdraw from all of the disputed territories, does not in fact require them to do so.
"U.N. Resolution 242 was very carefully drafted," said former Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Dore Gold.
"It called for recognition of 'secure and recognized borders.' [The] 1967 borders were not secure [but] invited aggression," Gold added.
Former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was in office during the 1967 Six-Day war as well as when the U.N. resolution 242 was drafted, said that it was not up to the U.S. to say "where other nations should draw lines between them that will assure each the greatest security. It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of June 4, 1967 will not bring peace."
According to Gold, former President George Bush recognized this principle at the Madrid Conference in 1991, which launched the Middle East peace process, when he said that the process had to be based on "territorial compromise."
Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered PA Chairman Yasser Arafat approximately 88 per cent of the disputed territories during the summer. He is now said to be willing to hand over 95 per cent of the area, although he has pledged to annex blocs of Jewish settlements where some 200,000 Israelis live in the land they consider to be an eternal Biblical inheritance in Judea and Samaria.
If anything, Gold said, the current Palestinian intifada has shown that Palestinian intentions can turn overnight and that Israel must continue its "quest for defensible borders."
Barak is widely reported in the Israeli media to be weakening on another key Palestinian demand - that of sovereignty over the disputed Temple Mount, the site of two important mosques built on the ruins of two ancient Jewish Temples.