Israel-Palestinian talks skirt specifics

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has steadfastly resisted full-fledged peace talks with the Palestinians, held a wide-ranging discussion with their leader Sunday on relations between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met for two hours; aides attended the first half and then left the two to talk one on one. The leaders issued no statements afterward, leaving the aides to give somewhat differing accounts.

Saeb Erekat, an aide to Abbas, called the meeting a breakthrough, the first time since the collapse of peace talks in 2000 that the two sides had discussed a scenario for Palestinian independence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“We started today to talk about a political horizon” beyond the conflict, Erekat said. “It was a good beginning.”

However, Israeli officials said Olmert avoided “final status” issues at the heart of the conflict, including the borders of a future Palestinian state, a possible division of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees who want to return to homes in what is now Israel.

U.S. prodding

The luncheon meeting at Olmert’s official residence was arranged under prodding by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is struggling to revive peace efforts. The two men, who had met three times since December, agreed recently at Rice’s insistence to hold talks every two weeks.

Olmert has refused to address final status issues unless the Palestinian Authority government, a coalition of Abbas’ Fatah faction and the militant movement Hamas that refuses to make peace with Israel, explicitly recognizes the Jewish state and forswears violence.

Meanwhile, the Israelis say, any talks about a peace settlement are hypothetical.

“They did not speak about final status issues,” David Baker, an Olmert spokesman, said after Sunday’s meeting. “They did speak about a political horizon, which included economic cooperation with a future Palestinian state and expanding the dialogue about economic ventures with Palestinians and how a future Palestinian economy would be comprised in such a state.”

But Erekat, at a news conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said the two leaders touched indirectly on key political issues while discussing a Saudi peace initiative recently revived by the Arab League. He predicted a more substantive discussion in the coming weeks.

“Not all issues can be resolved in one, two or three meetings,” Erekat said. “But I can say that we have started to talk.”

Before the meeting, Olmert repeated his willingness to hold talks “with any group of Arab countries on their ideas” for a settlement with the Palestinians, indicating that Israel would take part in preliminary talks being organized by the Arab League. The Saudi plan calls for Israel to withdraw from lands it seized in the 1967 Middle East War, in exchange for Arab recognition of the Jewish state. It proposes a Palestinian state on that land with East Jerusalem as its capital.

But Olmert’s aides emphasized that the Israeli leader rejected some elements of the Saudi plan, especially the return of Palestinian refugees who fled present-day Israel during its 1948 war for independence.

‘A delicate game’

Critics said Olmert’s overtures seemed to be risk-free gestures aimed at creating the illusion of progress toward peace in order to distract public attention from corruption scandals in his administration and a forthcoming official report on the government’s conduct of the inconclusive war in Lebanon last year.

On the other hand, columnist Ben Caspit wrote Sunday in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, Olmert’s talks with Abbas and possibly with the Arab League are part of “a delicate game” of diplomacy that could gain a momentum of its own. “Even if the chances of [Olmert’s initiatives] ever maturing into something genuine are not high, that chance exists,” he wrote.

Sunday’s talks featured sparring over unkept promises made in previous meetings: Abbas’ pledge to halt arms smuggling into the Gaza Strip and rocket fire from that area into Israel; Olmert’s commitment to significantly ease travel restrictions for Palestinians in the West Bank and between Gaza, Israel and Egypt.

An aide said Olmert insisted that Abbas “put all his weight, all his influence” to win the release of Israeli soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Palestinian militants, including some from Hamas, nearly 10 months ago along the Gaza border.

The leaders discussed but reported no response to the captors’ demands, passed recently to Israel through Egyptian mediators and Abbas’ government, to free 1,400 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

In Gaza, meanwhile, a previously unknown Palestinian group said Sunday that it had killed a British journalist kidnapped March 12 in Gaza City, but the claim could not be confirmed.

The group calling itself the brigades of Tawheed and Jihad said it killed BBC reporter Alan Johnston, 44, to call attention to the imprisonment of thousands of Palestinians in Israel. The Palestinian government and the BBC said there was no evidence to back up the claim.

boudreaux@latimes.com

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Special correspondent Maher Abukhater in Ramallah contributed to this report.