Word: palestinians
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Just how many bowling pins can Ehud Olmert juggle at once? The embattled Israeli Prime Minister is fighting off a corruption probe, negotiating prisoner swaps first with Hizballah and now Hamas, and simultaneously orchestrating indirect negotiations with Syria and direct peace talks with the Palestinian Authority. And the strain is starting to show. On Tuesday, Olmert told a parliamentary committee that an accord with the Palestinians on the future status of Jerusalem is unlikely by the end of this year, which would deny President Bush the in-principle Middle East peace agreement he hoped to achieve before leaving office...
...Olmert isn't giving up on talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas just yet. The Israeli Prime Minister said that while the fate of Jerusalem would remain unresolved, the remainder of a peace agreement that would give the Palestinians control over much of the land occupied by Israel in 1967 was still probable. The proposed deal, of course, is a "shelf agreement," an exercise in marking out the parameters of a future peace process that would be implemented only when Israel's security demands are met. The assumption, in the talks, is that the current Palestinian leadership would be unable...
...Still, Olmert's backtracking on Jerusalem - a deal breaker for the Palestinians - is a significant splash of cold water on the enthusiasm that the Israeli Prime Minister himself expressed two weeks ago in Paris, when he told French President Nicolas Sarkozy that Palestinians and Israelis have never been closer to a peace agreement. Until now, Olmert had been playing along with a rosy Bush Administration-scenario that predicted a peace agreement (if destined for the shelf, rather than implementation) by the end of 2008. Palestinian negotiators are now saying that without an agenda that includes Jerusalem, which Palestinians want...
...American posture; it certainly didn't hurt him to be seen swooning over the only American politician whose motorcade through Paris would be met by thousands of cheering Frenchmen. When Obama went to Sderot, an Israeli town at the edge of Gaza that has been pounded for years by Palestinian rockets, he was accompanied by both Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who may be rivals in a bid to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert...
...wouldn't take any option off the table to prevent that from happening, he stopped short of saying that he's in favor of the United States using force to stop the Iranians - which is what many Israelis yearn to hear. And the presumptive Democratic nominee also met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah - a trip that Republican nominee-to-be John McCain did not make when he was in Israel a few months...