Sharon Agrees to Seek Vote on Peace Plan

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has reluctantly agreed to take a U.S.-backed peace plan to a Cabinet vote this weekend in exchange for an American promise to consider his government’s numerous reservations about the plan, an Israeli official in Washington and a newspaper here reported Thursday.

The surprise decision, reported in Jerusalem’s Haaretz newspaper and confirmed by the Israel official, breaks a tough diplomatic stalemate and raises the slight hope that peace talks could calm the 32-month-old Palestinian uprising.

Since the plan was unveiled last month, Israeli leaders had rejected the so-called “road map” and demanded about 15 wording changes. Meanwhile, annoyed Palestinian officials, who immediately embraced the proposal, refused to crack down on militants until Israel signed on to the plan.

The standoff was cracked this week by negotiations in Washington between Sharon’s chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, and U.S. national security advisor Condoleezza Rice. The two drafted an agreement of “very creative wordsmith-ship,” said the Israeli source in Washington, who requested anonymity.

That allows Israel to endorse the plan with the promise that the Jewish state’s doubts remain open to discussion, the official said.

The Bush administration has sought to gain Israeli and Palestinian backing for the plan without getting sidetracked into debate over the specifics. “We don’t want to spend time negotiating the road map,” Rice said this month.

Bush met earlier this week with Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad at the White House, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said, but he gave no details of the meeting.

It was unclear whether Palestinian officials, who have insisted that Israel must accept the draft without revisions, would consider the compromise an acceptable show of good faith.

When Sharon met last weekend with his Palestinian counterpart, Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, both leaders spent hours trying to sway the other to his side. As the talks opened, Palestinian militants began a spate of five suicide bombings in 48 hours against Jewish targets, leading Sharon to cancel a trip this week to Washington. At that point, the prospects of any progress toward peace talks seemed slim.

The plan was unacceptable, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir said earlier this week, because it failed to rein in Palestinian militants.

“It does not ensure a fair and harsh supervisory system to make sure the Palestinians are really going to disarm,” he said. If it were accepted, Meir said, “we’d have a terror state on our border.”

But many Palestinians dismissed Israel’s objections as a way of staving off difficult sacrifices. The phased plan, which calls for the immediate halt of attacks on Israel and the eventual creation of a Palestinian state, would force both sides to confront harsh sticking points right away.

Israel would be forced to stop building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, take down some of its Jewish outposts and pull some soldiers out of territory claimed by the Palestinians.

The settlement issue hits to the core of the conflict: Many Israelis regard the settlers as brave pioneers who are “redeeming” biblical land that rightfully belongs to Jews.

Palestinians condemn the settlers as renegades who are stealing another people’s territory.

The settlement question could prove politically difficult for Sharon, who cobbled together a fragile coalition this winter by joining ranks with the far-right religious parties -- lawmakers who are the most ardent settlement supporters. Analysts have predicted that if Sharon moves to dismantle the outposts, his government probably won’t survive, forcing early elections.

Sharon began his term speaking of “painful concessions” in exchange for peace. The prime minister said Israel was ready to abandon some of its settlements. Last week, however, he told the Jerusalem Post that Jews should continue to live in the Palestinian territories.

“Sharon needs the trust of the extremists in Israel,” said Palestinian analyst Manuel Hassassian. “He is the prime minister in an ambience of extremism, in a government that can’t deliver peace.”

Meanwhile, Palestinians are grappling with a crisis of their own. The peace plan would require the fledgling Palestinian government to shatter the networks of militants in Gaza and the West Bank.

The powerful organizations are regarded by many Palestinians as freedom fighters or Islamic armies; most Israelis see them as bands of ruthless terrorists.

Caught between foreign pressure and street-level danger, Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, has spent the last week in Gaza, holding conciliatory talks with radical factions, security advisors and the families of Palestinian prisoners.

He tried in vain Thursday in a meeting with leaders of the radical group Hamas to persuade them to end attacks on Israel.

Palestinian officials warn that a military attack on Hamas could spark civil warfare. But to Israelis, Abbas’ painstaking negotiations are a source of prickly anger.

Some Israeli officials argue that Abbas is unwilling -- not unable -- to round up the militants. Sharon has demanded that Palestinians purge themselves of violent political cells by force. Otherwise, he said, there can be no talk of peace.

“A truce or cease-fire is no substitute for dismantlement of the terrorist infrastructure,” Ranaan Gissin, a top advisor to Sharon, said Thursday. “[Negotiation] only buys Hamas time.”

Until now, Abbas had an easy reply to Israeli demands to break down the underground radicals: not until Israel endorses the peace plan.

If Sharon persuades Israeli lawmakers to endorse the plan, Abbas will be forced to act. The Palestinian prime minister left the two-hour meeting with Hamas on Thursday without talking to reporters.

Hamas leaders, meanwhile, remained uncompromising.

Hamas leader Ismael Hanyeh said that “the Zionist enemy” must stop killing Palestinian civilians and assassinating Islamist leaders and release all Palestinian prisoners before Hamas would stop targeting “so-called civilians on the Zionist side.”

Palestinian Culture Minister Ziad abu Amr, who accompanied Abbas to the Hamas talks, said the Palestinian leader hadn’t reached an agreement with “our brothers in Hamas” and that talks would continue.

After Abbas’ job was created at the insistence of the United States and Israel, the radical factions rejected the new prime minister as a puppet of Zionism and foreign interests. But the groups were willing to negotiate with Abbas because they didn’t believe they would ever have to follow through on any promises, Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib said.

“They believe that Israel probably will not accept the peace plan so they will not have to do anything,” Khatib said.

Abbas was originally tapped by foreigners eager to bypass Yasser Arafat, the aging guerrilla-turned-Palestinian president whom Israel says gives at least tacit support to terrorists from within his ruined Ramallah compound. Israeli officials insisted that Arafat approved a suicide bombing last weekend in order to discredit Abbas; some Israelis called this week for the iconic leader to be sent into exile.

The complaints intensified Thursday after the Israeli navy commandeered a suspicious fishing boat in the Mediterranean Sea.

On board they discovered a suspected Hezbollah bomb maker, along with computer disks containing detailed diagrams and instructions on bomb making, assembling deadlier explosive belts for suicide bombers and strategies for inflicting the most damage when blowing up a bus.

“We have not seen these high-level explosive charges in the West Bank and Gaza,” a senior Israeli military official told reporters at a briefing in Tel Aviv.

Israeli naval and army officials asserted that two members of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority orchestrated the smuggling operation.

That accusation was scorned by Palestinians as a cheap way to smear Arafat.

“We know, and the Israelis themselves know, that these claims are untrue,” said Abu Amr. “The Israeli government is trying to find an excuse to keep President Arafat confined.”

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Times staff writers Rebecca Trounson in Jerusalem and Doug Frantz in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.