Netanyahu Snubs British Official for Visiting Disputed Housing Site

JERUSALEM — In a major diplomatic snub, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angrily canceled a dinner with visiting British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on Tuesday after Cook met a Palestinian official at a disputed housing project in East Jerusalem.

Netanyahu, who also cut short an evening meeting with Cook, said the British diplomat had violated an agreement with Israel not to meet with Palestinians at the controversial site, known as Har Homa in Hebrew and Jabal Abu Ghneim in Arabic. Cook said he had broken no such promise.

The rebuff followed days of angry words between Israel and Britain over the visit by Cook, who has called on Israel to halt Jewish settlement expansion to revive the deadlocked Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The peace process has been stalled for a year, since the Netanyahu government launched construction of a large Jewish neighborhood on the disputed hilltop in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.

“We were told . . . there would be no contact with Palestinians near the site,” Netanyahu told reporters after his abbreviated session with Cook, which was bereft even of the traditional handshake for photographers. “There was an agreement which unfortunately was not kept.”

Netanyahu also used the occasion to reiterate Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem, including the east side, which has been under occupation since it was captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War. Israel had argued that a meeting by Cook with Palestinian officials in or near the new neighborhood would lend support to Palestinian claims to East Jerusalem as the capital of their own hoped-for state.

“We cannot accept the approach that Jerusalem will be redivided into two capitals,” the Israeli leader said. “This will not happen. . . . Israel is and will remain sovereign in Jerusalem.”

Cook, meanwhile, denied that he had violated any understanding with the Israeli government by his brief encounter on the edge of the building site with Palestinian legislator Saleh Tamari, who has helped lead the Palestinians’ opposition to the project.

“We repeatedly bent over backwards to accommodate their concerns,” Cook told reporters after seeing Netanyahu. The British pointed out that Cook said from the outset that he would visit the site.

The controversy over Cook’s brief stop at the project overshadowed the rest of his one-day visit, which included meetings with Israeli President Ezer Weizman, Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai and, in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

But Israeli officials also were upset by what they called a serious breach of etiquette, a decision by Cook to skip a visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.

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British officials appeared taken aback by the tumult. Cook had hoped to breathe new life into the stalled peace talks and raise the profile of Europe in Middle East diplomacy, they said. Tempers in the West Bank remained high Tuesday as family members buried a 13-year-old Palestinian boy who was fatally wounded last week when Israeli troops fired on demonstrators in Hebron.

Cook’s stop at the hilltop was chaotic. In a driving rain, Cook and his entourage chatted briefly first with Israeli Cabinet Secretary Danny Naveh and representatives of Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert. The British officials then drove to the other side of the hill, near the Palestinian communities of Um Tuba and Sur Bahur, where Tamari, a Palestinian legislator from Bethlehem, was waiting in the rain.

So, however, were dozens of angry Jewish demonstrators, who pushed and shoved around the British and Palestinian officials until they called off their meeting.

Maher Abu Khater of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.