Israel agrees to free 441 Palestinian prisoners

Seeking Arab nations’ support for an American peace initiative, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert won his government’s approval Monday to free 441 Palestinian prisoners and reaffirmed a pledge to tear down dozens of unauthorized Jewish settlement outposts in the West Bank.

Olmert’s gestures at a contentious Cabinet meeting were aimed at drawing high-level Arab delegates to a peace conference next week, although they fell short of what Palestinian and Arab leaders had demanded -- a freeze on all settlement growth and a larger prisoner release.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have tentatively planned the conference for Nov. 27 in Annapolis, Md., to launch the first substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in seven years, with the goal of a Palestinian state by the end of Bush’s presidency.

In months of shuttle diplomacy, Rice has failed to narrow differences on the big issues -- the new state’s borders, control of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes at the time of Israel’s creation in 1948. But she achieved a procedural breakthrough this month by persuading Olmert to agree that those core issues can be tackled even before the Palestinian Authority leadership disarms militants dedicated to destroying Israel.

U.S., Israeli and Palestinian officials say the peace initiative will fail, however, unless Arab states firmly endorse it.

Olmert’s response Monday left it unclear whether Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations would dispatch their foreign ministers to Annapolis, downplay the U.S. initiative by sending lower-ranking functionaries, or rebuff it by staying home.

The Israeli leader was traveling to Egypt today to urge President Hosni Mubarak to lobby for full-scale Arab support. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is heading to Egypt on Thursday with the same purpose -- to persuade Arab League members who will meet there to decide on participation at Annapolis.

Amid the uncertainty, the United States has yet to announce a firm date for the conference or issue formal invitations. Israeli and Palestinian officials are making tentative travel plans to Maryland this weekend while fending off critics who warn that the gathering is ill-prepared and doomed to fail.

Avigdor Lieberman, a right-wing member of Olmert’s broad-based coalition, spoke forcefully in Monday’s closed Cabinet session against Israeli participation in the conference, saying the prime minister should stay home and fight terrorism.

When Olmert mentioned his intent to curb Jewish settlements, Lieberman lit into him, according to participants in the meeting. “You are choking the settlements!” Lieberman was quoted as saying.

Olmert reminded him that the first phase of Bush’s 2003 “road map” plan to create a Palestinian state requires both sides to take steps to ease tensions on the ground, including a halt to Jewish settlement growth on territory the Palestinians claim for their state. The plan never took off; Israel balked at meeting its initial obligations because the Palestinians were making little effort on theirs, mainly to fight terrorism.

Rice’s initiative aims to revive the road map, with a key modification: While working toward full compliance with the first phase, the two sides would start negotiating on borders, Jerusalem and refugees -- issues once relegated to later discussion -- right after the Annapolis meeting.

She has persuaded Abbas to agree that any final settlement cannot be implemented until both sides take all steps spelled out in the road map’s first phase.

Moving to comply, Abbas’ government has deployed hundreds of additional police officers to Nablus and other West Bank cities in recent weeks to show it is serious about disarming militant groups. His Fatah forces control only the West Bank, having lost control of the Gaza Strip in June to Hamas, the radical Islamic movement opposed to the peace process.

In turn, Abbas, backed publicly by Saudi Arabia and the Arab League and quietly by the Bush administration, pressed Olmert to declare a complete settlement freeze before the peace conference.

The Israeli leader was unwilling to go that far. In his standoff with Lieberman, he said Israel was not going to “choke off” existing settlements.

But Olmert added, according to spokeswoman Miri Eisen: “We cannot ignore our obligations. We committed not to build new settlements; we won’t build new settlements. We promised not to expropriate [Palestinian] land; we won’t expropriate. We promised to raze illegal outposts; so certainly, we will raze them.”

That statement left many questions unanswered. Israel has not built a new settlement in nearly 10 years, but the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now reported this month that government-authorized housing was being built in 88 of the West Bank’s 122 settlements. Olmert did not address Israel’s road map commitment to freeze such growth of existing settlements. Nor did he say when his government would act against the 51 smaller, unauthorized outposts that Peace Now says Israel is required by the road map to raze.

Palestinian leaders seized on those omissions. “Either it’s a 100% settlement freeze or no settlement freeze,” said veteran negotiator Saeb Erekat. “There is nothing in the middle.”

Israeli officials said Olmert was unwilling to be more specific for fear of inflaming right-wing opposition to the peace talks.

“He is fully committed to the road map, and the arbiter of compliance is the United States,” Eisen said. “The Palestinians need to do more to fulfill their obligations before they point fingers. After Annapolis, we will start implementing these steps in parallel. We don’t have to do everything now.”

The Bush administration welcomed the gestures on settlements and prisoners. “These would be important steps in advance of the Annapolis conference, important confidence-building . . . steps,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in Washington.

Although Israel’s prisoner release would be the largest in a single batch in years, it was a letdown to Abbas, who had called for freeing 2,000 of the approximately 9,000 Palestinian prisoners held by the Jewish state.

Israeli politicians said Olmert felt constrained by opposition from the Israeli army chief of staff and right-wing members of his coalition to freeing prisoners before the peace conference. Six of the Cabinet’s 27 members voted against the move, even though no one convicted of a fatal terrorist attack is to be freed.

Later, Abbas met with Olmert for what both sides called two hours of productive talks. They put negotiating teams back to work for a final effort to draft a joint statement for the peace conference, an effort that had broken down. Wary of opposition by Hamas and Israeli hawks, both teams had been trying to finesse a vague document addressing the major issues without hinting at concessions they are prepared to make.

“The negotiations will start after Annapolis,” Olmert told the Cabinet. “These will be long, difficult, complicated and intensive negotiations. On every issue it is expected there will be crises and disagreements and even painful compromises.”

boudreaux@latimes.com