Olmert pays West Bank visit

With two army helicopters escorting his motorcade, Ehud Olmert ventured into the West Bank on Monday to discuss the most divisive issues of a possible peace settlement, the first visit by an Israeli prime minister to Palestinian territory in seven years.

“I am delighted to see you,” Olmert said, embracing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas inside a heavily guarded hotel in the city of Jericho. The Israeli leader said he had come to discuss “fundamental issues” in the decades-old conflict, “hoping that this will lead us soon into negotiations about the creation of a Palestinian state.”

Spokesmen for both leaders said their three-hour meeting was the start of an effort to shape the agenda of a Middle East peace conference that President Bush has called for this fall. But they announced no agreements except to keep meeting frequently.

Abbas and Olmert had held six previous meetings, starting in December, to discuss how to revive the full-fledged peace talks that were broken off in 2000 after the start of a Palestinian uprising.

Their meetings have produced some confidence-building steps, such as Israel’s release of 255 prisoners and an agreement by 178 Palestinian militants to stop fighting the Jewish state.

Until now, however, Olmert had been reluctant to address the core issues standing in the way of a settlement. Israeli officials said he feared that Abbas couldn’t control militants and that any breakdown in peace talks might lead to new violence.

Monday’s meeting marked a slight shift in Olmert’s position.

“It was different from the other meetings because now both men are engaged in talking about the fundamental issues of the conflict,” Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator who sat in on part of the session, told reporters.

“Mr. Olmert and President Abbas did not come to the meeting with magic wands,” he said. “I do not want to raise anyone’s expectations. But I think the meeting was very serious, very deep, and they agreed to continue their endeavor.”

Olmert’s shift came after prodding from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who visited the region last week. She urged him and Abbas to tackle the most divisive issues before the peace conference, which is expected to be held in November.

Those issues -- which Abbas has said he wants to settle without delay -- include the final borders of a future Palestinian state, conflicting claims to Jerusalem, the status of Palestinian refugees who fled their homes before or during Israel’s 1948 war for independence, and the fate of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

But though Olmert agreed to put those issues on the table, Israeli officials said he was hesitant to try resolving them fully before the conference this fall. Instead, they said, he wanted to hammer out an “agreement of principles” that, if endorsed by the conference, would guide detailed negotiations later.

“If these talks get too specific too soon, we could endanger the peace process,” said Mark Regev, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. “There are people waiting for negotiations to fail so they can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

An “agreement of principles” on Jewish settlements could say, for example, that Israel would dismantle some West Bank settlements, giving the Palestinians “a viable, contiguous territory for their state,” but would keep some large settlement blocs, Regev said.

“But it’s not time yet to draw lines on a map,” he added.

Olmert did agree Monday to consider new steps to build the Palestinians’ trust in peace talks. Abbas asked him to free more prisoners and to allow 39 West Bank militants to return home from exile in the Gaza Strip and Europe. The militants had been banished as part of a deal to end an Israeli military siege in 2002 of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where the fighters were holed up.

The Israeli leader’s visit to Jericho was meant to raise Abbas’ stature among the Palestinians, whose loyalties are sharply divided between Abbas’ secular Fatah movement and the Islamic group Hamas, which advocates Israel’s destruction. The visit also tested the ability of the Fatah-led security forces, which hold sway in the West Bank, to cooperate with the Israelis in a relatively placid city.

Israel’s army sealed checkpoints around the biblical desert city while Palestinian police blocked roads around the hotel where the two men met. The hotel lies a few hundred yards from the nearest Israeli checkpoint.

The last top-level meeting between the two sides on Palestinian soil was in 2000, when Ehud Barak, then Israel’s prime minister, held peace talks with Abbas’ predecessor, the late Yasser Arafat, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Hamas, which ousted Fatah’s forces from Gaza in bloody factional fighting this summer, derided Olmert’s visit to Jericho as a gesture “aimed at beautifying the ugly image of the Israeli occupation before the world.”

Meanwhile, Israel’s army sentenced eight soldiers Monday to 28-day prison terms for refusing orders to help evict two Jewish families from illegally occupied apartments in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Israeli media reported that as many as 30 soldiers had announced that they would not serve as backup for today’s planned eviction led by Israeli police.

boudreaux@latimes.com

Special correspondent Maher Abukhater in Ramallah contributed to this report.