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Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aea4aac6-591f-11df-adc3-00144feab49a.html
Weary Cast Back to Produce Middle East Peace
(Financial Times-UK) Tobias Buck - The stage is set, the actors are primed, the American director is busy giving last-minute instructions. Any moment now, the curtain will rise to reveal the latest production of a long-running, but often sadly disappointing, favorite: the Middle East peace process. The audience is right to be skeptical. True, the U.S. administration has finally managed to cajole the Palestinians into accepting a new round of peace negotiations with Israel, putting an end to more than 15 months of diplomatic stalemate. However, mistrust between the two sides is now so deep that Palestinian and Israeli negotiators will not even talk to each other face-to-face. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have been talking to each other for almost two decades. Indeed, some members of the Palestinian cast have been on stage virtually without interruption since the Madrid peace conference in 1991. However, one of the few tenets on which both sides can agree today is that the latest U.S.-sponsored peace effort is an exercise in futility. The Palestinians want to keep the U.S. as closely involved as possible, in the hope that a frustrated Obama administration will eventually table its own peace plan. Israel, in contrast, regards the talks as a preamble to face-to-face negotiations that would see the U.S. take more of a backseat role.