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Source: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.574759
Don't Expect Abbas to Sign Anything
(Ha'aretz) Shlomo Avineri - As prime minister, Ehud Olmert met 36 times with PA President Mahmoud Abbas and couldn't reach an agreement with him. Olmert was prepared to go further than any other Israeli leader in meeting the Palestinians' demands, but when Olmert proposed that Abbas sign a document containing the Israeli concessions, he refused. This is exactly what happened in 1995 in Yossi Beilin's talks with Abbas. There was never any Beilin-Abbas agreement. There was only a paper laying out Israeli concessions. Abbas will talk as long as the talks are designed to lead Israel to make more and more concessions. Then he will bring the negotiations to a halt, so they can be restarted in the future "where they left off": with all the previous Israeli concessions included, and no concessions having been put forward by the Palestinian side. The writer, professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, served as director-general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.