REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JERUSALEM - The same negotiators, the same issues, a familiar venue: The sense of deja vu is overwhelming as Israelis and Palestinians start Wednesday, August 14, 2013 on their third attempt in 13 years to draw a border between them. But they face even longer odds than in the last round, which ended in 2008.
Since then, at least 40,000 more Israelis have settled in areas the Palestinians want for a state, making it even harder to partition the land. The chaos of the Arab Spring has bolstered Israeli demands for ironclad security guarantees, such as troop deployments along Palestine's future border, widening a dispute that seemed near resolution five years ago.
The talks come after months of prodding by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who made six visits to the region since taking office in his bid to bring together Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu together.
Despite US cheerleading, expectations have been low on both sides. Ahead of Wednesday's talks at Jerusalem's King David Hotel, the atmosphere soured further after Israel said in a series of announcements in the past week that it is advancing plans for more than 3,000 new homes for Jews in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem.
"It's not just deliberate sabotage of the talks, but really the destruction of the outcome," said senior Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi. "Israel has transformed the negotiations into a cover and a license to steal land."
Israel argued that it's mainly building in areas it wants to keep in any border deal. "This construction that has been authorized in no way changes the final map of peace," said government spokesman Mark Regev.
In Israel, attention focused on anguish over the expected release Tuesday of 26 long-held Palestinian prisoners, part of a US-brokered deal that persuaded the Palestinians to resume negotiations. In all, 104 veteran prisoners are to be freed in four stages, depending on progress in the border talks, for which the US has allotted nine months.
The negotiators meeting Wednesday — Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Netanyahu aide Yitzhak Molcho for Israel, and Abbas advisers Saeb Erekat and Mohammed Shtayyeh for the Palestinians — have spent countless hours with each other in previous talks and are familiar with the issues down to the tiniest detail.
That's not a recipe for success, though. The sides made progress in previous rounds, starting in 2000, and the outlines of a deal have emerged — a Palestinian state in the vast majority of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, lands captured by Israel in 1967, with border adjustments to enable Israel to annex land where most of the more than 500,000 settlers live.
However, talks broke down each time before the two sides reached the truly explosive issues: dividing Jerusalem and finding new homes for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Even on the land swaps, gaps remained. Abbas offered Israel 1.9 percent of the West Bank, while Netanyahu's predecessor Ehud Olmert proposed keeping 6.5 percent.
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