Palestinians Make Anti-Terrorism Pledge

A high-level Palestinian delegation told Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Thursday that Yasser Arafat’s government will exert maximum effort to stop terrorism, but that pledge was not enough to break the stalemate in the Middle East peace process.

“I think it is clear that the Palestinian Authority is taking steps to thwart terrorism,” State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said after Thursday’s meeting, which was called to allow Albright to brief the Palestinians on President Clinton’s talks earlier this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Nevertheless, Burns said, “the United States believes that these talks are at an impasse.” The administration has not decided what to do next, he said.

Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, told reporters after the meeting that Arafat’s government “has been exerting more than 100% effort to stop the cycle of violence.” He dismissed Netanyahu’s charges of a Palestinian “green light” to suicide bombers as nothing more than propaganda.

In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors a few hours before her meeting with the Palestinians, Albright said the Arabs and Israelis have lost the confidence in each other that is the basis for a successful peace process. She called on each side to take steps to rebuild that trust.

But neither Netanyahu nor the Palestinian delegation has offered a hint of anything they might do to ease tensions. Instead, each side outlined a long list of confidence-building measures that it wants the other to take.

Even Erekat’s pledge to curb terrorism seemed likely to anger the Israelis, because he insisted that no change is needed in Palestinian Authority policies, which he said have always been designed to stop terrorism.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank city of Hebron, Israeli troops wounded seven Palestinians with rubber bullets in the latest round of clashes, witnesses said.

Burns said the administration considers the Israelis and the Palestinians equally responsible for the impasse.

In her ASNE speech, Albright endorsed the Israeli assertion that there is no justification for terrorism, regardless of the perceived provocation. “It should be obvious that there is no moral equivalence between bulldozers and bombs and no justification for terror under any circumstances,” she said.

At the same time, Albright called on Israel to stop trying to preempt future negotiations with such unilateral actions as the construction of a new Jewish neighborhood on a hillside in historically Arab East Jerusalem that Israelis call Har Homa and Arabs refer to as Jabal Abu Ghneim.

“Israelis must see that terror will not be used against them as a means of leverage in negotiations,” Albright said. “Palestinians must see that Israelis are not taking unilateral actions on issues that are reserved for permanent negotiations.”