Netanyahu Phones Arafat to Offer a ‘Message of Peace’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent an envoy to Yasser Arafat and later spoke by phone with the Palestinian Authority president Sunday in a bid to calm tensions over government benefits for Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Asked what he relayed to Arafat in the telephone call, Netanyahu told Israel’s Itim news agency: “A message of peace.”

The meeting in Gaza between Arafat and Netanyahu advisor Yitzhak Molcho was the first such high-level contact in weeks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, a spokesman for Arafat said. No details were immediately available about the meeting.

Earlier, Netanyahu launched a media offensive in a series of interviews with Israeli radio and television stations to defend his Cabinet’s decision Friday to grant such benefits as tax breaks to West Bank settlers.

The Palestinian Information Ministry has called the Israeli move a declaration of war.

Netanyahu accused Palestinians of plotting violence even before he reinstated the financial incentives-- canceled by the Labor-led government he defeated in May’s elections--for Jews to settle in the West Bank.

Netanyahu said he told U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk of his government’s decision before it was formally made. Washington called the aid to settlers, given after guerrillas killed a settler and her son last week, “troubling.”

In a drive to curb the settlements and revive peace negotiations, former U.S. secretaries of state and ex-national security advisors are circulating a letter urging the Clinton administration to rein in Netanyahu’s government.

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III already has publicly urged President Clinton to speak out against establishment of new Jewish homes in the West Bank.

The letter in circulation among former secretaries of state Cyrus Vance, Lawrence Eagleburger and Baker, and former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft asks the administration to prod Netanyahu to reverse new infusions of financial support to Jews with homes and businesses in the West Bank.

Past administrations have criticized Israeli settlements as obstacles to peace. The Clinton administration has taken a softer approach.