Prisoner Issue Stalls Mideast Peace Talks

In a flourish of eleventh-hour melodrama, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators haggled into today over the last, tiny details of a plan to revive the long-stalled Middle East peace process.

But they failed to reach an agreement, and negotiations fell apart--for the time being. Freedom for a handful of Palestinian prisoners emerged as the apparent deal-blocker.

“Our negotiating leeway has ended,” a senior Israeli official said this morning after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak concluded a marathon session with his inner Cabinet. The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, angrily condemned the Israeli position as “very unfortunate.”

Until that point, substantial progress had been reported on a new, expanded version of last fall’s U.S.-brokered Wye Plantation agreement, which calls for Israeli withdrawal from portions of the West Bank. Instead, the original Wye accord is to be implemented, Israeli officials said, with fewer perks for the Palestinians than a new deal might have offered.

The apparent setback came as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright traveled to the region, spending the night in Rabat, Morocco. She had hoped to oversee a signing ceremony this afternoon in Alexandria, Egypt, but that gathering was in doubt early today.

Still, Israeli officials held out hope that they and the Palestinians could reconcile their differences within the next day or two, and U.S. officials were also working feverishly to bridge the gaps.

The last-minute tiff represented the kind of brinkmanship typical of Middle Eastern politics. Israeli and Palestinian officials spent much of Wednesday trading ultimatums, demands and puzzled looks. It was not at all clear if this was an insurmountable deadlock or, more likely, a case of calculated posturing.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have been attempting to agree on ways to rescue the Wye accord from nine months of deadlock. Sealing a deal is important because it would mark the first accord to be signed by Barak, whose landslide election in May raised high expectations for regional peace. And it would open the way for a final, comprehensive settlement to the century-old conflict between Arabs and Jews.

But the quibbling seemed to bode ill for those future talks, which are supposed to delve into far more complicated disputes, such as the future of Jerusalem.

Erekat, who on Wednesday praised the “civilized” atmosphere of his dealings with the Israelis, this morning accused his negotiating partners of reneging on parts of the deal as a way to apply pressure. The Israelis, on the other hand, said all along that they were waiting for a “satisfactory” response from the Palestinians.

The two sides were very close.

The most significant stumbling block, both sides said Wednesday, was the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. The Palestinians view the prisoners as freedom fighters, while Israelis see them as terrorists.

In the negotiations, Israel offered to release 350 Palestinian prisoners in two stages, concluding Oct. 8, Palestinian Prisoner Day. In addition, it would form a committee to study the individual cases of other prisoners who could be released, possibly for the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which begins in December.

However, Erekat said the Palestinians wanted 400 prisoners--down from earlier demands of 650--to be freed, including some who murdered Israeli citizens before the two sides put a formal end to hostilities in 1993 with the landmark Oslo accords.

Israel has shifted its criteria for releasing prisoners slightly to include those who killed Palestinian collaborators. But freeing those who killed Jews “is totally unacceptable,” an Israeli negotiator said.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat has had to face the wrath of his public over his failure to gain the prisoners’ freedom. Nearly every Palestinian family has a member who is or was in prison.

The issue is agonizing for Israelis too. Ads in newspapers Wednesday demanded that Barak refuse to release killers.

If the original version of Wye is implemented, Israel believes that it is obliged to release only 120 prisoners, instead of the 350 it is proposing, and that it can back out of deals that would allow the Palestinians to quickly open safe-passage routes between the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to construct a Gaza seaport.

In a sign of how close they were to agreement, Erekat and his Israeli counterpart, Gilead Sher, drafted a four-page document, called a “non-paper” in diplomatic parlance because it has not been signed. The non-paper has a title that says a lot about the tedious, piecemeal nature of the talks: Memorandum on Implementation Timeline of Outstanding Commitments of Agreements Signed and the Resumption of Permanent Status Negotiations.