Mideast Negotiators Promise to Meet Again

Saying they came closer than ever to resolving the core issues of their conflict, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators ended six days of talks Saturday with no agreement, but they promised to meet again after Israel’s Feb. 6 election.

The two sides issued a joint statement that said the intensive negotiations at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Taba had ended with “a sense of having succeeded in rebuilding trust between the sides and with the notion that they were never closer in reaching an agreement between them than today.”

But the talks failed to produce the sort of dramatic breakthrough that caretaker Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak desperately needs if he is to have any hope of overcoming hawkish challenger Ariel Sharon’s double-digit lead in the polls. And it left him open to charges from the opposition that he made concessions and got nothing in return.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said he hoped that Barak would meet with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat this week to try to further narrow the gaps. Israel Radio reported that the two might meet in Stockholm on Tuesday or Wednesday.

“We’re ending this phase with a feeling that we are close to a settlement, but also a feeling that we don’t have at the moment enough qualitative political time in order to facilitate an agreement,” Ben-Ami said at a news conference called by the two sides Saturday night. The progress made, he said, formed a “platform, a basis for an agreement that could be reached after the elections.”

Israeli negotiator Yossi Sarid told reporters that he thought a partial agreement could be reached in two or three weeks. Both sides stressed that the talks contained none of the rancor that has marked their exchanges since the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip erupted Sept. 28. The violence that has raged since has claimed about 375 lives, most of them Palestinian, has derailed U.S.-brokered talks and threatens to end Barak’s term of office nearly two years early. Barak resigned in early December and triggered next month’s election.

Sharon harshly attacked the outcome of the Taba talks.

“Barak is jeopardizing the state of Israel just so he can produce a piece of paper that will add something to the election campaign,” he told Likud Party activists Saturday night. “Once the citizens of Israel learn what’s in the paper, and what Barak gave up, he will not get the extra votes.”

Sharon has said repeatedly that he will not honor any results of the Barak government’s negotiations with the Palestinians. He has said that he does not believe a comprehensive settlement can be reached with the Palestinians for years and that he would instead pursue interim nonbelligerency agreements. The Likud Party leader has also said he would agree to negotiations only if Palestinians stopped attacking Israeli civilians and soldiers.

On Saturday, Silvan Shalom, a Likud member of the Israeli parliament, accused Barak of trying to put a likely Sharon government into an untenable position by making far-reaching concessions that he knows Sharon would never accept.

“Barak has led to a situation in which he gave up almost everything, he didn’t reach peace, and the next government will be coerced into continuing the talks from the point they were left in,” Shalom told Israel Television. “We will not agree to such a situation, and then things might escalate--perhaps into bloodshed--and naturally everyone will blame us.”

Meeting without the involvement of the United States, in working groups that compared detailed maps, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators appeared to have narrowed gaps on such sensitive issues as the permanent borders of Israel and a Palestinian state and the future of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But they provided no details in individual statements Saturday of exactly what was achieved.

Senior Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Korei said the gap between the two sides remains wide on the question of whether Palestinians who fled when the state of Israel was created in 1948, and their descendants, have a right to return to their former homes. Israel, he said, refuses to acknowledge such a right. The Palestinians say that about 4 million refugees and descendants of refugees should have the option of returning to Israel if they choose to do so. Israel has said that such an influx would destroy the Jewish state.

“Nothing had been achieved on the refugee issue,” Korei told reporters. “This is a fierce battle, a battle which has two red lines--one set by us and, unfortunately, one set by them. If they will not recognize the right of return, there would be no progress.”

The Palestinians reportedly are ready to accept Israel’s retention of blocs of Jewish settlements in about 4% of the West Bank in exchange for Israeli land. Israel, for its part, seems willing to abandon many of the illegal settlements it has constructed since it captured the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War.

Korei also said the two sides discussed the future of Jerusalem in detail for the first time. He said the Palestinians demanded that Israel dismantle satellite settlements built near Jerusalem on land captured in 1967. Korei said the Palestinians rejected Israel’s demand that it control their airspace and keep military outposts in the Jordan Valley.

Sharon has said he would not agree to relinquish any Jewish settlements and would offer the Palestinians control of far less land than Barak would. He also has said Israel will maintain sovereignty over all of Jerusalem. The Palestinians are demanding sovereignty over East Jerusalem, captured by Israel from Jordan, and say they would make it the capital of a Palestinian state.

President Bush called Barak on Saturday and expressed his belief that “a secure Israel” must be a key element of Middle East peace, according to White House officials. Bush has disbanded the special Middle East peace team that operated from the State Department throughout the Clinton administration and has indicated that he intends to be far less actively involved in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts than his predecessor was.

The Taba talks were hosted by Egypt. Both Israelis and Palestinians thanked the Egyptians and the European Union, which sent a representative, for their support. Neither side mentioned the United States in its separate statement.