Israeli PM Netanyahu to visit Australia

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Sunday.

The Jerusalem Post reported Mr Rivlin “apologised profusely” to Ms Bishop after he cancelled a scheduled state visit to Australia in March this year for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

Shortly before the Bishop-Netanyahu meeting, Bishop had been sitting with Reuven Rivlin who said that he was “so very sorry” not to have kept plans to visit Australia six months ago, when he needed to head to Russian Federation instead.

The Palestinians favor the French peace initiative launched in June at a one-day summit in Paris of foreign ministers from two dozen countries aimed at rebooting peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, who were not invited to the event.

The Netherlands would also facilitate expert meetings between Dutch, Israeli and Palestinian officials focusing on energy and water, he told a joint press conference.

Palestinian officials were more pessimistic, however, saying that a meeting was now unlikely to take place.

In conjunction with the launching of the initiative, leaders of Decision at 50 today sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, asking for a meeting to explain the rationale for the referendum and to lay out the details of the legislation required by the Knesset to put the referendum initiative in motion. “I said this to his envoy Bogdanov”. “We can not allow ourselves another 50 years of governments’ indecision, during which decisions are made every day on the ground”, the founders of the initiatives say. If Abu Mazen is ready to meet for direct talks without preconditions, I am ready at any time. “Just yesterday Palestinian spokespersons made it clear that they are ready to meet but they have conditions – releasing prisoners, they want to know if the talks will have results, etc”.

Raafat said the Russian initiative did not yet set any fixed date for the meeting.

Any meeting between the two men would represent a breakthrough of sorts.

Decision at 50 is the result of cooperation between several Israeli organizations, led by Peace Now and Blue White Future.