French President Francois Hollande urged Israel and the Palestinians to make a “courageous choice” for peace as he opened a conference on the conflict in Paris last night.
The meeting is aiming to lay the ground for a fully fledged peace conference to be held by the end of the year but few believe genuine progress will be made.
Neither Israel nor the Palestinians have been invited to the talks and Israel has angrily compared the French initiative to the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement to draw up the region’s borders.
And although US Secretary of State John Kerry is attending the conference, Washington has made it clear it believes little or nothing will be achieved.
Mr Hollande said a solution would have to come from the Middle East region, but in the end it was up to the Israelis and Palestinians “to make the courageous choice of peace”.
“The discussion on the conditions of a lasting agreement between Israelis and Palestinians must take into account the whole of the region,” he told representatives of 25 countries, as well as the UN, EU and Arab League.
Read the full article in The Weekend Australian