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Clinton seeks Arafat,Barak back to negotiations

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November 5, 2000 

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bill Clinton hopes to see Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the White House next week to begin trying to cajole them back to negotiations despite ill will engendered by more than a month of violence.

With a Clinton-brokered truce finally taking hold, Arafat was planning a post-election meeting with the president, probably Wednesday or Thursday. Barak is likely to come to Washington for a separate session, but there was no definite word by late Friday.

The sessions would give Clinton another chance to try to promote a settlement between the two sides. But mistrust deepened during the conflict on the West Bank, in Gaza and in Israel, and Arafat has made clear he will settle for nothing less than East Jerusalem as capital of a Palestinian state.

Barak turned him down at the Camp David summit that Clinton organized in July and probably won't reverse himself now.

Arafat, meanwhile, is due to declare statehood, whatever the outcome of U.S. mediation, on Nov. 15, and there seems very little chance a settlement could be reached by then.

White House spokesman P.J. Crowley said Friday that "the president hopes to see both leaders in the very near future" to discuss how to implement the agreement reached in Egypt two weeks ago to stop the fighting and to "discuss a way back to the negotiating process."

"There will not be a three-way meeting" of Clinton, Arafat and Barak, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said after talks with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and national security adviser Sandy Berger.

Erekat said Arafat issued two public statements calling for an end to the violence. And now, the negotiator said, "We want to see the United States exert every possible effort on the peace process."

He described his conversation with Albright as "very candid," which in diplomatic jargon often means there were rough spots.

Albright has said repeatedly that Arafat could do more to stop the violence.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Albright and Erekat talked about the importance of carrying out understandings reached in Egypt and how to build a bridge back to the peace process.

"What matters in terms of progress or lack thereof is what happens on the ground," Boucher said.

Erekat said the Palestinians want "international protection" for their people and that Israel should pull back from refugee camps and other Palestinian concentrations.

But he said he found "not that much enthusiasm" at the White House about deploying international forces needed to protect Palestinians from Israel.

In Los Angeles, Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish social action group, urged Clinton to delay any meeting with Arafat until "all the terrorists and murderers that have been released" from Palestinian prisons are returned to jail.