Settlement Expansion Stalls Mideast Talks

Negotiations aimed at producing a final Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty within a year ground to a sudden halt Monday, just before Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s scheduled arrival to inject new urgency into the peace process.

Responding to new reports of a rapid acceleration in the pace of Israeli construction at West Bank Jewish settlements, Palestinian negotiators declared that they would not proceed with the recently launched talks until Israel stopped all settlement expansion.

Yasser Abed-Rabbo, who heads the Palestinian team at the “final status” talks, and other Palestinian leaders said it was “inconceivable” that critical discussions would go forward while the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak continues to build in the controversial West Bank communities.

“We have stressed to the Israelis that this issue is creating a major obstacle in the path of the final-status negotiations,” Abed-Rabbo said after meeting his Israeli counterparts Monday in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “We cannot move forward without resolving this issue.”

Israeli officials dismissed the dispute as artificial, created by the Palestinians in the hope of drawing Albright into a direct mediation role during her two-day stop here. They said the settlement expansion plans were drawn up by previous governments and that Barak is legally obligated to let them proceed.

Danny Yatom, a senior Barak aide, tried to reassure the Palestinians. “As it is our approach not to create obstacles, we’ll find a way to make sure that the settlements will be no obstacle in the future negotiations,” Yatom told Israel Radio. He did not say what Israel’s next step might be.

U.S. officials said similar crises often have occurred in the negotiating process as American envoys have made preparations to come to the region, and they said it was not yet clear how serious the dispute was.

But the controversy casts a shadow over Albright’s visit, already complicated by disagreements between the parties over a delayed Israeli troop withdrawal from another chunk of West Bank land, and by what human rights groups describe as a sharp escalation in Israeli demolitions of illegal Palestinian homes.

It also underlines the difficulty facing the two sides, and their American interlocutors, as they try to meet a February deadline to produce a blueprint for an agreement to resolve the toughest issues between them: the status of Jerusalem, the future of Jewish settlements in occupied territory, the fate of Palestinian refugees, water rights, and the borders of a Palestinian “entity,” widely expected to be an independent state. The participants have pledged to try to reach a detailed agreement by September.

Albright arrived in Saudi Arabia late Monday. She was scheduled to fly to Syria for talks with President Hafez Assad and on to Israel late today.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin told reporters on board Albright’s aircraft that she plans to appeal to both Israel and the Palestinians to avoid actions that make reaching a comprehensive peace more difficult.

“We regard settlement activity as a complicating factor in the peace process,” Rubin said. “It would prejudge the outcome of the negotiations. It obviously can harm the environment in which the peace process has to take place.”

As regards the Palestinians, he said, “We do not think that the Palestinian side should impose preconditions that would make it more difficult to go forward with final-status talks.”

Earlier Monday, U.S. Middle East peace envoy Dennis B. Ross tried but failed to break a deadlock over the transfer of more West Bank land from Israeli to Palestinian control. The hand-over was to have taken place Nov. 15, but the Palestinians object to the areas Israel chose.

The latest dispute over the settlements was triggered by statistics released by the Israeli group Peace Now. Since July, the Barak government has approved the construction of 3,196 housing units, of which 500 were signed off on last week. The government is on course to far exceed the yearly average of 3,000 new homes in the settlements during the tenure of Barak’s right-wing predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Peace Now.

The rate and timing of the expansion have outraged the Palestinians, who regard all settlements as illegal.

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this report.