A former US ambassador to the United Nations and and Norweigan diplomat who helped negotiate the 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and Palestine, said that the crisis in Gaza was beyond saving. John Bolton, US ex-UN envoy, wrote in the Washington Post Monday that settling the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of a two-state solution was no longer workable and suggested giving the Palestinian territories to Egypt and Jordan. Across the pond a former 1993 Oslo accord mediator said diplomacy would not work in bringing an end to the fighting. “With all due respect to the EU and the world's most activist diplomacy of our time, the French, (the bloc) lacks influence with both Israel and Hamas,” Jan Egeland, who heads the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), told the NTB news agency. He also described the Middle East peace Quartet - the EU, the United States, United Nations and Russia - as “bankrupt”, and nothing was accomplished for 10 years towards creating lasting peace in the region. Instead, Egeland stressed the importance of US influence on Israel saying that the “ball is in the US's court.” “Let's start by recognizing that trying to create a Palestinian Authority from the old PLO which has failed and that any two-state solution based on the PA is stillborn,” Bolton wrote in The Washington Post. “Instead, we should look to a ‘three-state' approach, where Gaza is returned to Egyptian control and the West Bank in some configuration reverts to Jordanian sovereignty,” Bolton said
