Israeli Premier Not Ready to Outline Deployment

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will give Secretary of State Madeleine Albright a map outlining Israel’s general “security interests” in the occupied West Bank when they meet in Paris on Thursday, but he will not specify what land Israel intends to hand over to the Palestinians in coming months.

Despite marathon Cabinet meetings on the pullback--and consultations in the last few days with coalition partners, Jewish settlers and rabbis--government officials said Tuesday that the Cabinet still has not agreed on details for a long-overdue troop redeployment in the West Bank.

The government is trying to establish its position for final peace negotiations--a map of Israel’s final borders--before handing over any more land. But the right-religious coalition is deeply divided on the matter.

The Israeli media reported that Netanyahu will tell Albright he is prepared to give the Palestinians no less than 10% of West Bank territory that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War. But U.S. and Israeli officials insisted that he will not present her with hard numbers.

“I will certainly update Secretary of State Albright about our considerations,” Netanyahu told a meeting of mayors in Herzliya on Tuesday. “It’s possible that I will discuss maps, but there are no final maps we can show her, because we are in the middle of the discussion.”

Israeli officials said they do not expect to make a decision on the extent and locations of the redeployment until mid-January, after what is expected to be a tough political battle over next year’s national budget. The Israeli government then wants to wait five months more to implement the pullback to see if the Palestinians comply with their commitments to cooperate in fighting terrorism against Israel.

Although Albright apparently had hoped for more details than she will get in Thursday’s meeting, U.S. and Palestinian officials say they are willing to wait until after the Israeli budget fight, in order to keep the two issues separate.

“We’re prepared to listen to whatever they have to say,” said a senior U.S. official. “We expect the prime minister to be as concrete and specific as possible. . . . But we know he is staying away from numbers. He has nothing that he has sold internally, and he wants to do that first before he comes to us with numbers.”

The Palestinians accepted the few weeks’ delay but rejected Israel’s intent to wait five more months after announcing its decision before moving its troops.

Israel still fully controls about 73% of the West Bank and has security control over all but about 3%. While Israel has been saying it will relinquish 6% to 10% of the West Bank, the United States has been pressing for a “credible” redeployment that would begin in the double digits. The Palestinians have demanded 30% of the territory in the next redeployment.

Albright is scheduled to meet with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat in London after seeing Netanyahu. She met separately with the two leaders last week in a bid to break the nine-month impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai and Infrastructure Minister Ariel Sharon have given the Cabinet maps outlining how much of the West Bank each believes Israel must hold on to in a final agreement with the Palestinians to guarantee the country’s security.

Mordecai presented two maps. One shows what the military estimates is necessary to defend Israel’s borders. The other is a broader document showing “national interests”--with more Jewish settlements, water and electricity systems and roads that Israel might want to keep for national or political reasons but that are not key to the country’s security. Sharon argues that the broader map is essential to Israel’s security.

The daily newspaper Haaretz reported that Mordecai’s security map calls for Israel to retain more than 52% of the West Bank and would leave 42 of 144 Jewish settlements outside Israeli control. Sharon’s preferred map keeps 63% of the West Bank in Israeli hands and includes virtually all settlements.

The Palestinians want all of the land that Israel occupied in the West Bank, as well as East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

At Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, Sharon could be heard through the doors screaming at his colleagues that the government was going too far and crossing “red lines” of Israeli interests.

He calmed down before the meeting broke for the night.

The ministers were to resume discussions today, but officials expected no decision at least before the Cabinet takes a scheduled tour of the West Bank on Monday.

Meanwhile, leaders of the “Greater Israel Front” in the Netanyahu coalition have been meeting with rabbis to discuss ways to prevent the next redeployment. The prime minister met with Rabbi Moshe Yehoshua Hagar, president of the Council of Torah Sages, to seek his support for the pullback. And rabbis associated with the National Religious Party urged their representatives to pull out of the coalition and bring down the government if Netanyahu hands over any more land before the Palestinians meet their security obligations.