Israel, Palestinians at Odds Over Albright’s ‘Timeout’

Everybody seems to like U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s idea for a “timeout” in unilateral acts that impede Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The problem is no one agrees on what it means, particularly when it is applied to the construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says “timeout,” he means continuing his policy of building to keep up with “natural growth” in West Bank settlements, while agreeing not to start any new settlements for a period of time. And Jerusalem is not part of the discussion.

For the Palestinians, “timeout” means Netanyahu should take a break on all construction on all lands that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War.

If Albright’s recent slip of the tongue calling settlement activity “legal” is any indication, the United States is likely to accept Israel’s definition and press the Palestinians to agree in the interest of pursing negotiations for a final peace agreement.

The United States’ long-standing policy has been to avoid using the terms “legal” or “illegal” regarding settlements, instead calling them “an obstacle” or “counterproductive.”

Albright spokesman James P. Rubin clarified that the secretary had meant to say only that the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement does not specifically prohibit settlement construction--not to signal a change in U.S. policy.

Nonetheless, Israeli officials feel confident that the Clinton administration will back their definition in order to get peace talks back on track. And a U.S. official concurred.

“It’s highly unlikely there will be a confrontation with Israel over settlements,” said the official, who declined to be identified. “It is not an issue we are prepared to pick a fight over. ‘Timeout’ is being discussed in the context of final status talks, and that is the larger, more important objective.”

In U.S.-brokered talks at the United Nations this week, Israel and the Palestinians agreed to resume negotiations after a six-month breakdown over Israeli settlement construction and suicide bombings by Islamic extremists.

They decided to establish parallel negotiations, with one track addressing implementation of existing agreements and the other focusing on a broader agenda that hopefully will lead to “final status” negotiations on Israeli settlements, control of Jerusalem, borders of the Palestinian-ruled areas and Palestinian statehood.

The first round is scheduled to begin in the Middle East on Monday, on the creation of an airport and seaport in Palestinian-ruled areas and a safe-passage route for Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

U.S. envoy Dennis B. Ross is to come to the region to get those talks off the ground.

The second round is to begin Oct. 13 in New York and take up the more difficult issues of Palestinian security cooperation against terrorism; the further redeployment of Israeli troops in the West Bank to transfer more territory to the Palestinians; and defining “timeout.”

Albright has so far been unable to forge a joint definition. All sides seem to agree that talks aimed at reaching a final peace agreement cannot begin until there is an agreement on a “timeout.”

As soon as the agreement on two-track talks was reached in New York, Netanyahu reiterated his position on settlements.

“We agreed to discuss the concept of a timeout, and each side has, of course, their own view. . . . You know we are building in the settlements, enabling natural growth, and I don’t intend to change our policy,” he said.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Israel must budge from “business as usual” if the peace process is to continue.

“We view ‘timeout’ as meaning cessation. Stop. Halt. This is our understanding of the term,” Erekat said in an interview.

“Either both sides end unilateral actions that will predetermine the outcome of issues such as settlements, or you settle the issue by building settlements. . . . If the settlements are allowed to continue, we don’t need final status negotiations because he’s doing it anyway,” Erekat said.

But U.S. and Israeli officials believe that the Palestinians want to get back to the bargaining table as much as they do and so will accept a limited timeout that Netanyahu can try to sell to the far-right and religious members of his coalition.

Many of Netanyahu’s partners in government, believing that the Jewish state has a God-given right to settle in the West Bank lands they call by the biblical name of Judea and Samaria, do not want any limits on building in any territory that Israel controls.

Netanyahu is prepared to limit himself to building in “adjacent and contiguous” areas of existing settlements but not to agree to a freeze or to include Jerusalem in the deal, according to a government official who asked not to be identified.

“I don’t think the Americans will go to the mat on this,” he said.

In fact, the United States has rarely gone to the mat with Israel over settlements, of which there are about 40 in the West Bank with more than 140,000 residents.

East Jerusalem, much of which is annexed West Bank land, now has a majority of Jewish residents, living in housing built after 1967.

In the years right after the Israeli occupation, the United States took the stand that settlements were a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which covers the protection of civilians in territories occupied during a war. President Carter publicly declared them illegal in 1977--a stand that most U.S. allies still take.

But in 1981, a newly elected President Reagan said settlements were not illegal; since then, U.S. policy has been to avoid a judgment about legality and to talk about how provocative they are.

Under President Bush, Secretary of State James A. Baker III withheld loan guarantees to press Israel to stop building settlements under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, but such pressure is not expected from the Clinton administration.

“We don’t actually oppose the concept of natural growth, which was part of our policy under [the previous, Labor Party governments of Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin and Shimon Peres,” the U.S. official said.

Along with the Palestinians, Israeli peace activists challenge Netanyahu’s concept of natural growth, saying that his government in its first year has already built more than half the number of settlement housing units that the Labor governments built in 3 1/2 years. About 4,700 units are now in various stages of construction in the West Bank, compared with 8,000 units built under Labor.