Manuel Valls to meet Netanyahu, who has rebuffed French initiative to create international forum for Israeli-Palestinian agreement
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls will visit Israel and the Palestinian territories this month in a bid to relaunch the peace process following the worst flare-up of violence in the Gaza Strip for two years, his office said Tuesday.
His visit, from May 21-24, comes as France seeks to engineer a peace deal based on a two-state solution.
It will happen ahead of a May 30 meeting which France is organizing for ministers from 20 countries to try and relaunch the Israel-Palestinian peace process.
That proposed meeting has been welcomed by the Palestinians, who have suspended a planned UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements to focus on the bid.
But Israel has consistently argued that peace can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the two sides, rather than international forums.
French Foreign Minister Marc Ayrault has said the aim of the meeting is to prepare an international summit in the second half of 2016, which would include the Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Valls will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 23.
He will arrive in Israel the previous day and also plans to meet President Reuven Rivlin, former prime minister Shimon Peres and opposition leader Isaac Herzog.
On May 24 he is scheduled to travel to Ramallah where he will hold talks with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah.
The trip to Israel will also be a chance for Valls to smooth over a row over a recent UNESCO resolution, backed by France, which spoke of “Occupied Palestine.”
Netanyahu has attacked the “absurd” resolution which also condemned “Israeli aggressions and illegal measures against the freedom of worship and Muslims’ access to their Holy Site Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram Al Sharif,” failing to mention the site’s Jewish name of the Temple Mount.
Netanyahu, in response to the resolution, invited all UN personnel in Israel for a seminar on Jewish history, which the prime minister said he would personally host himself. The UN turned down the invite.
On Sunday, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told a Jewish group he does “not take a supportive view of the text” that France voted to approve, adding it “should not have been adopted” and that the resolution passed “was not written as it should have been,” the Le Figaro daily reported.
As reported by The Times of Israel