More than three years behind schedule, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators finally sat down yesterday to begin final status negotiations which are intended ultimately to yield a comprehensive settlement in the bloody 100-year-old conflict between the two peoples.
The two negotiating teams held a 75-minute meeting in a room at the Grand Park Hotel in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where they first posed for photographers and then began discussions which centred largely on their respective opening positions and procedural topics.
On the table are a series of seemingly intractable issues which stand at the heart of the conflict: the future of Jerusalem, the creation of a Palestinian state, the fate of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Palestinian refugee issue. Already yesterday the large gaps between the two sides were evident as the delegation heads outlined their opening positions.
The Chief Palestinian negotiator, Mr Yasser Abed Rabbo, who said the sides would meet two or three times a week, reiterated the Palestinian demand that Israel withdraw from all the land it captured during the 1967 war - the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. He also said the Palestinians would insist on self-determination and on the right of millions of Palestinian refugees, who fled or were expelled from Israel in 1948 and 1967, to return to their homes or to receive compensation. He also insisted that Jewish settlement construction had to be halted if a peace treaty was to be reached.
For his part, Israel's chief negotiator, the diplomat Mr Oded Eran, declared that Israel would never give up any part of Jerusalem, would never withdraw to the 1967 borders and would insist that the majority of the almost 200,000 Jewish settlers in the territories remain under Israeli sovereignty.
Despite the predictably tough opening salvos, both men sounded an optimistic note after their meeting. Mr Abed Rabbo described the atmosphere between the sides as "open and frank", and added that "with this atmosphere, I believe we will be able to build the agreement we all seek".
Mr Eran said he believed the sides could reach agreement within the ambitious timetable that has been allotted - a framework agreement by February next year and a final deal by September. "We are neighbours, we are partners," he said. "It is our duty to this generation and the next generation to find a solution to this conflict."
Final status talks were officially launched in 1996 under then Labour prime minister, Mr Shimon Peres, but were frozen during the three-year term of the hardline Likud prime minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, both the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, are acutely aware that renewed violence by Palestinian extremists could once again endanger the entire peace process, as it did back in 1996 following a spate of suicide bombings by the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement. That threat was starkly illustrated on Sunday when 33 Israelis were injured in a bomb attack in the coastal town of Netanya, which police suspect was the work of Palestinian militants bent on torpedoing the peace process.