The turmoil engulfing the Middle East makes it urgent that Israel and the Palestinians return to negotiations and make peace, Israeli President Shimon Peres said on Sunday.
The veteran Israeli politician said that while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not the cause of much of the problems affecting the region, it was being manipulated by the enemies of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
"The dramatic events of recent days raise the need to remove the Israeli- Palestinian conflict from the daily agenda as soon as possible because the conflict is being exploited to the detriment of both sides," Peres said at a conference in the seaside town of Herzliya north of Tel Aviv.
Peres spoke of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, the political turmoil in Lebanon, the north-south split in Sudan and Iran's nuclear program.
His comments echo those of the Middle East diplomatic Quartet -- the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations, which met in the German city of Munich on Saturday.
"History has lost its patience, it is happening at a gallop. Either we gallop with it or it will leave without us. There are those who say we need to wait for the storm to subside, no one knows when it will end," Peres said.
Expressing hope for future talks, Peres touched a nerve for Palestinians, saying "In the past we have seen the Palestinians being suspicious that a right-wing government in Israel would never agree to a two-state solution. They were wrong. We've assumed that the Palestinians would forever insist on the right of return of five million refugees. We were wrong," he said in an apparent referral to documents leaked by The Guardian and Al-Jazeera known as the Palestine Papers.
Some 1,600 transcripts, maps and letters, the documents revealed the substance of nearly ten years of negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Many of the highlighted information showed gaps between the public stance of the body - the insistence on the return of Palestinian refugees and the place of Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital - and the concessions made during the talks.
Talks between Israel and the Palestinians, relaunched on September 2 after a long hiatus, fell apart weeks afterward after Israel refused to renew a temporary ban on building settlements in the West Bank.
The Palestinian leadership refuses to resume negotiations as long as Israel builds on land wanted for a Palestinian state.