Israel rejects new Palestinian government

Israel declared Thursday that it would not deal with the newly named Palestinian government, saying the proposed coalition showed no sign of recognizing the Jewish state or meeting other international conditions for ending an aid embargo.

Israeli officials said the draft platform for the new government, under which the Islamic militant group Hamas will share power with its main rival, Fatah, appeared to maintain the hard-line stance of the current government, which has been run solely by Hamas.

“Unfortunately, the new government refuses to accept the three international benchmarks. It refuses to accept Israel’s right to exist, it refuses to renounce terrorism and violence, and it refuses to accept the signed agreements in the Middle East peace process,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

“Accordingly, Israel will not deal with this new government.”

Regev said the West should maintain its aid boycott unless the Palestinian government meets those conditions. The West laid out the criteria last year after Hamas defeated Fatah in parliamentary elections.

The Israeli reaction came as Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh formally presented President Mahmoud Abbas with the proposed lineup of ministers who will serve under the power-sharing arrangement forged by the factions last month in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

The Cabinet list -- with 10 Hamas ministers and six from Fatah, plus nine who are independent or represent smaller factions -- is to be endorsed Saturday by the Palestinian parliament. Haniyeh is also to lay out the coalition government’s proposed political program that day.

A draft of the platform posted on a Hamas website said the government would “respect” agreements between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, wording that falls short of the international conditions.

Israel also objects to wording defending the Palestinians’ right to resistance, which it considers an endorsement of violence, and to other provisions it says undercut prospects for peace.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the unity deal “a leap backward.”

Leaders of Hamas and Fatah agreed to share power in hopes of halting months of deadly factional clashes and ending the Western aid embargo, which has deprived the Palestinian Authority treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars to pay salaries and other expenses.

The new government faces towering challenges, including ending lingering animosities between the factions and restoring law and order under a newly appointed interior minister, Hani Kawasmi, a virtual unknown who does not belong to either faction but is close to Hamas.

Success will also hinge largely on whether donors again begin providing the desperately needed aid.

“It depends on whether the international community is going to deal with it,” said Ali Jarbawi, a political science professor at Birzeit University in the West Bank. “Are they going to deal with it? Are they going to recognize it?”

U.S. officials have said they will wait until the new Cabinet is named before deciding whether to end the yearlong bid to isolate the Hamas-led government. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made it clear during a visit here last month that the new government would have to meet the Western demands to win U.S. acceptance.

On Thursday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Bush administration would withhold judgment until the final composition of the government and its political programs were clear.

Palestinian leaders say they have received more sympathetic signals from European officials, and the decision to form the Hamas-Fatah coalition appears aimed in large part at finding fissures in what has been a solid Western front against renewing aid. The conditions for resuming assistance were laid down last year by the so-called quartet of Middle East peace mediators: the United States, European Union, Russia and United Nations.

“You can already see the cracks in the front of the quartet,” said Anat Kurz, a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

Kurz said the Mecca agreement, seen initially as a triumph for Hamas, might prove an accomplishment for Fatah’s Abbas by strengthening his hand for peacemaking.

The unity pact can help keep the Palestinians at the table at a time when Arab regimes, led by the Saudis and including Egypt and Jordan, are pushing a regional solution to the Middle East conflict, Kurz said, and the Mecca deal is tied to that push.

“This is an effort made in order to pave the way to creating a central, legitimate Palestinian representation that hopefully eventually could be the address for talks,” Kurz said.

The Saudis are trying to revive a 5-year-old initiative that calls for normalizing Arab relations with Israel in return for its withdrawal to pre-1967 borders and a solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees. Saudi leaders plan to seek a fresh endorsement at an Arab League summit in the kingdom’s capital, Riyadh, this month.

Israel once rejected the initiative, but Olmert has recently praised the proposal as having “positive elements.” Still, Israeli officials say the initiative as first adopted by the Arab League in 2002 is unsatisfactory because of language they view as leaving the door open to the return of refugees to Israel, rather than solely to a future Palestinian state.

ellingwood@latimes.com