Peace agreement can be reached: Israeli deputy minister

Israel and the Palestinians can wrap up a final peace deal within two years, Israel’s deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh said today, becoming the first senior Israeli official to propose a timeline for long-stalled peace talks.

Earlier in the week, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced she would soon meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to explore ways to accelerate peacemaking and establish a Palestinian state.

“Two years are enough to conclude a detailed agreement,” Sneh told a conference at the Netanya Academic College.

“We should discuss, maybe for six months, the principles, and move forward about the details of final status agreement,” Sneh said.

Olmert and Abbas held their first substantive meeting on December 23 in an effort to get long-stalled peace talks moving again.

Olmert pledged, in a confidence-building gesture, to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians, and to transfer £50m (€76m) in frozen funds to the Palestinians, whose finances have deteriorated sharply over the past year because of an international boycott of the militantly anti-Israel Hamas government.

But travel restrictions remain onerous, and nearly a month later, less than £5m (€7.6m) in frozen funds have been released.

Abbas, whose Fatah faction is locked in a bloody power struggle with Hamas, needs the concessions to prove to the Palestinian people that there are benefits to engaging Israel in dialogue designed to lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Nearly four years ago, Israel and the Palestinians accepted the internationally backed “road map” peace plan that was to have led to Palestinian statehood by 2005. But the plan foundered soon after it was presented.

Both sides have failed to carry out obligations that were to be fulfilled before negotiations on a final deal could be launched.