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Arafat, Barak pressured to meet |
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September 26, 2000
JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli and Palestinian leaders met in Israel on Monday under U.S. pressure to come up with a permanent deal, but with little to show after two months of massaging the dealbreaker — Jerusalem. Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat met for three hours late Monday night at Barak's home in the town of Kochav Yair in central Israel and received a call from President Clinton during the talks, Barak spokesman Gadi Baltiansky said. He said the meeting, which ended at 12:30 a.m., was conducted ``in a very good atmosphere and a positive spirit'' and described it as an ``evaluation and an exchange of views.'' He said the leaders did not negotiate ``specific'' issues. Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian parliament speaker, who sat in at the talks, also called the meeting ``positive,'' adding that ``the issues were discussed generally without getting into substance.'' That meant the sides avoided discussion of Jerusalem, the issue that broke up the U.S.-sponsored Camp David talks in July. Aside from an exchanged greeting or two at the U.N. Millennium summit earlier this month, the two have not met since then. Negotiating teams from both sides were to leave for Washington within hours of the meeting's end for separate talks with the Americans. The negotiators — Mohammed Dahlan and Saeb Erekat for the Palestinians, and Acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami and Gilead Sher for the Israelis — were at the meeting, along with other senior officials. ``Both leaders told the U.S. president that they are determined to make every effort and take advantage of every opportunity to reach agreement,'' Baltiansky said in a statement. Erekat told the AP that the Washington meetings would last two days, and that no trilateral meetings were planned. Dahlan, who said the Americans had proposed the new round of meetings, expressed the hope that the U.S. ideas would be more developed than those the Palestinians were asked to consider two months ago. ``At Camp David, they proposed an initiative that was not deeply studied, and because of that, they failed.'' In fact, negotiators on both sides said new ground was broken at Camp David on issues previously thought unbridgeable: Palestinian refugees, Jewish settlements and Jerusalem. The negotiators are under growing time pressure. Barak faces an increasingly hostile parliament that has threatened to topple him over his peace policies when it reconvenes in late October, and the Clinton administration wants a deal before the president's term ends. The core of the Jerusalem issue is control over a crucial holy site, the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third-holiest site in Islam built atop the ruins of the ancient Jewish temples. In the two months since Camp David, each side has moved forward on the issue — but barely. Israel has apparently given up its insistence on sovereignty over the site and says it is willing to consider a U.S. proposal that would transfer control to the five permanent members of the U.N. security council — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France. The Palestinians have also inched away from their own demand for full control, saying the site could ultimately be controlled by a committee of Islamic countries led by Morocco, a nation known for its friendliness to Israel. Each side has adamantly rejected the other's compromise proposal, and talks remain deadlocked. Ben-Ami said that even if there is no agreement, the Arafat-Barak meeting proved the sides were still dedicated to preventing a deterioration. ``I always said such meetings are essential,'' he said after discussing Israel's Jerusalem proposals with Egyptian leaders. ``They are essential for building confidence, to make it possible to move forward to an agreement and — if there is no agreement — so that it will be possible to manage the crisis.'' Dahlan said that approach showed a dangerous complacence. If the peace process failed, ``it would make it difficult to control the security situation,'' said Dahlan, who heads the security apparatus in Gaza. ``I doubt that we will be able to keep the security as it is now, in case of failure.'' Dahlan also rejected Barak's proposal this week to leave Jerusalem off the table for the time being. ``Delaying the issue of Jerusalem means that the struggle is not over,'' he said. ``All the groups that are anti-peace process, Jewish and Palestinian, will concentrate on the issue of Jerusalem, and the struggle would be moved from being a political struggle to a religious struggle.'' On the territorial issue, Dahlan said the Palestinians had agreed to a land swap of only 2 percent, not the 10 percent reported after the Camp David talks. He said 2 percent was enough to accommodate the major Jewish settlements. In Washington, Israel embassy spokesman Mark Regev said the talks' success was up to the Palestinians. ``No amount of talking will help if the Palestinians are not willing to display a flexibility that we have failed to see until now,'' he said. |