According to Herb Keinon at JPOST, Rice to issue Annapolis invites.
According to this article a major impass to achieving a DoP has been removed. Abbas has agreed that what ever is agreed, its implementation will await the fulfillment of Stage I of the Roadmap.
What worries me is that Israel can no longer raise the issue of its security as a reason for no capitulating fully.
JPOST also reports
Lieberman won’t support deal without land, population swap
Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his party Israel Beiteinu announced Saturday night that they would only support a final-status agreement if it included the transfer of Israeli Arabs to Palestinian territories. Lieberman also stipulates the deployment of NATO forces in the Palestinian areas in order to ensure Israel’s safety in the case of a surge of violence.
[The problem is that Olmert can replace them by bringing the Arab parties and Meretz into the coalition.]
The party issued a document stating its “red lines” for a final-status agreement ahead of the Annapolis parley scheduled for November. The statement came on the heels of declarations by Lieberman to the effect that he would leave the government and actively seek its downfall if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pushed for substantial Israeli concessions.
The statement was released despite the fact that both Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have already stated that the conference would not be a forum for such concessions.
In the statement, Lieberman reiterates his party’s policy that calls for land swaps – including in some east Jerusalem neighborhoods – and discounts, outright, the possibility of a “safe passage” between the West Bank and Gaza. “The state of Israel will not allow passage between Gaza and Judea and Samaria that transverses its sovereign territory,” the statement reads. “This situation is congruent with the one that existed prior to June 4 1967.”
Lieberman also expresses adamant opposition to any concessions in the matter of Palestinian refugees’ “right of return.” Even on the “humanitarian level,” Lieberman says, “this issue is absolute and non-negotiable.”
On the international level, the statement demands that any final-status agreement include international guarantees of Israel’s security and an across-the-board revocation of UN resolutions 242 and 338, which call for a full Israeli pullback to the 1967 borders.
Despite his willingness to allow for some compromise in east Jerusalem, Lieberman insists that the holy sites remain exclusively under Israeli sovereignty, and that all religions be reserved the right to worship in and around the city’s holy sites.
