Israel Lists Withdrawal Conditions

A week before President Clinton is to meet Israeli and Palestinian leaders in a high-risk bid to revive the flagging Middle East peace process, the Israeli Cabinet on Tuesday drew up a nine-page list of conditions that it said the Palestinians must meet before Israel will hand over any more West Bank land.

U.S. officials said the Israeli action would make Clinton’s task more difficult. The administration has said the pullback is essential to its efforts to restart the deadlocked peace talks.

“If you focus on the negative and what the other side isn’t doing, there’s no end to it,” a U.S. diplomat said. “There’s no way to create a partnership under those circumstances.”

Palestinian officials rejected the Israeli conditions, which add specifics to pledges made by the Palestinian Authority in a 1997 U.S.-brokered agreement that led to Israel withdrawing its troops from most areas in the West Bank city of Hebron. Ahmed Tibi, an advisor to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, accused Israel of stalling the peace process because it is unwilling to give up more land to the Palestinians.

“This is an excuse,” Tibi said. “The Israeli government is trying again to avoid implementing the [peace] agreements.” Tibi said the Palestinian Authority was preparing a list of Israeli violations.

The Cabinet decision made official what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israelis have said for weeks--that they would, as Infrastructure Minister Ariel Sharon first suggested, tie Israel’s withdrawal from more West Bank land to Palestinian fulfillment of obligations spelled out in the Hebron agreement.

In that accord, the Palestinians promised to finish revising their national charter, limit the size of their police force and work to fight terrorism. Israel said it would release Palestinian prisoners and carry out the first step of a three-phase withdrawal from the West Bank by last March. All three phases were to be completed by mid-1998.

Most of the demands in Tuesday’s Cabinet decision dealt with Israel’s security concerns, a point underlined this week by a high state of alert among Israeli forces against possible attacks by militant Islamic groups. On Tuesday, the third day of alert, extra police and soldiers were deployed nationwide.

Netanyahu told reporters Tuesday that the Cabinet decision was not an “ultimatum,” but a matter of honoring past agreements. “We are fulfilling all of our commitments, and we expect that the Palestinians will fulfill theirs,” the Israeli leader said before meeting with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

But U.S. officials, pointing to the overdue Israeli troop pullbacks, say neither side has kept all its promises under the peace agreements.

Coming just a week before Clinton is due to meet in Washington with Netanyahu and Arafat, the Cabinet action also appeared aimed at shoring up Netanyahu’s support among those members of his coalition who most staunchly oppose further concessions to the Palestinians.

U.S. officials have said Clinton hopes to push the deadlocked peace process forward. He is expected to urge Netanyahu to carry out the next redeployment quickly and Arafat to cooperate more closely with Israel in the fight against terrorism. Netanyahu’s meeting with Clinton is scheduled for Jan. 20, with Arafat following him to the White House on Jan. 22.

But with the resignation last week of Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy, a leading moderate, and the subsequent departure from the government of his five-member Gesher Party faction, Netanyahu is increasingly dependent on the small right-wing and religious parties in his fractious coalition.

Just how dependent was underlined Monday when a no-confidence vote brought by the opposition parties ended in a 54-54 tie, with two abstentions. Under new election rules, a majority of 61 members of the 120-member parliament is needed to oust the government, but the vote again showed the fragility of Netanyahu’s hold on power.

Since Levy’s resignation, both conservative and centrist parties in Netanyahu’s coalition have threatened to bring him down--if he cedes more land to the Palestinians or if he does not. Some Israeli analysts have predicted that Netanyahu will try to walk a political tightrope, hoping to appease Clinton and the Palestinians by promising to move forward with a redeployment and to keep the conservative and religious parties on his side by imposing many difficult conditions on the pullout.

The Cabinet has yet to decide on the toughest questions of the troop withdrawal: how much land will be turned over to the Palestinians and where. The government is to hold at least three more meetings before Netanyahu leaves for Washington but is unlikely to reach a decision on the scope of the withdrawal, Israeli officials said.