Abbas tells U.N.: It’s peace or settlements

— U.S. officials scrambled Saturday to find a compromise in a dispute threatening new Middle East peace talks as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said there will be no peace deal with Israel unless the Jewish state stops settlement construction.

“Israel must choose between peace and the continuation of settlements,” Abbas said in his address to the U.N. General Assembly’s annual ministerial meeting.

Meanwhile, Israeli settlers have hauled construction equipment into a Jewish settlement deep inside the WestBank, officials said Saturday, preparing to break ground on a housing project.

Direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians stalled only three weeks after starting in Washington in early September over the impending end of a 10-month freeze on new Israeli settlement construction on land claimed by the Palestinians.

AP interactive

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Abbas reaffirmed the Palestinian commitment to try to reach a peace deal.

“We have decided to enter into final-status negotiations. We will continue to exert every effort to reach an agreement for Palestinian-Israeli peace within one year in accordance with resolutions of international legitimacy ... and the vision of the two state solution,” Abbas told ministers and diplomats.

But with today’s deadline looming for Israel to resume the contested building, the Palestinians are waiting for U.S. efforts to break the impasse. President Barack Obama has increasingly placed efforts to resolve the conflict at the center of his foreign policy, but both Israeli and Palestinian officials said Saturday that a deal was far from certain.

In his U.N. speech, Abbas said, “Our demands for the cessation of settlement activities, the lifting of the siege [of Gaza] and an end to all other illegal Israel policies and practices do not constitute arbitrary preconditions in the peace process.”

These are past obligations that Israel is required to implement, he said, and Israel’s implementation “will lead to the creation of the necessary environment for the success of the negotiations.”

He said the Palestinians and the wider Middle East are continuously pushed into “the corner of violence and conflict” as a result of Israel’s “mentality of expansion and domination.”

Both sides began bracing for fallout from a possible breakdown in talks.

“It’s still in play,” one Israeli government official said anonymously Saturday. “There’s an intensive effort. But at this stage, I can’t tell you if there’s something that will be produced.”

Jonathan Fighel, a retired Israeli colonel and former military governor for the West Bank, said that even without direct talks, peace efforts could continue “quietly and discreetly. ... None of the three parties is interested in defining disagreements as a blowout because each will pay a price, including the U.S. So the parties will most likely downplay any problems.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas for the second round in Jerusalem and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, met Friday with Abbas. He was to meet with U.S. special envoy George Mitchell on Saturday. Netanyahu’s chief negotiator, Yitzhak Molcho, was also in the U.S., along with Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

The senior Israeli official said Molcho was asked to stay to find a mutually acceptable compromise on settlement building that would allow talks to go ahead.

“Both sides are playing brinkmanship, and of course brinkmanship is played right down to the brink,” said Jonathan Spyer, a political scientist at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. “It is likely a compromise will emerge that will be somewhere between renewing the moratorium in its entirety and abandoning the moratorium entirely.”

Israel Channel Two said one proposal would allow a gradual return to construction in the West Bank, with building first resuming in settlements that Israel hopes will remain under its sovereignty in any agreement. This proposal has been put forward in the past by Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor.Netanyahu has said the idea is Meridor’s personal opinion and doesn’t reflect government policy.

Another possible compromise would be a in which where the government wouldn’t allow any new permits or issue any new tenders seeking proposals for construction in the West Bank, said a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because Israel’s negotiating strategy is secret. Defense Ministry permission is required for building in the West Bank and Barak can block construction by withholding approval, he added.

Palestinians say it is essential that Israel leave the restrictions on settlement construction in place.

Abbas has repeatedly warned that he will be forced to walk away from the direct negotiations if construction resumes.

The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, home to 300,000 Jewish settlers, as part of a future state, and say that by expanding settlements, Israel is imposing facts on the ground that make it increasingly difficult to establish a viable country.

At the same time, Netanyahu faces pressure within his pro-settler governing coalition to resume construction. Hard-line elements in the coalition could try to bring down the government if Netanyahu extends the settlement slowdown.

“There is no reason why we should agree” to extend the restrictions, Limor Livnat, a Cabinet minister in Netanyahu’s Likud Party, told Israel Radio on Saturday.

She said some 2,000 homes have received all the necessary approval to be built and that construction should resume immediately. “Building simply must continue,” she said.

Pro-settler activists hauled bulldozers, cement mixers and other construction equipment into the Revava settlement in the northern West Bank on Saturday. Danny Danon, a pro-settler lawmaker in Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said activists would lay the cornerstone for a new neighborhood today, the last day of the slowdown, and planned additional construction Monday after the restrictions formally end.

Nawaf Souf, the Palestinian deputy governor in the area, said settlers have moved construction equipment and 20-30 mobile homes into Revava in recent days. The homes could be seen Saturday in a crescent shape on what appeared to be freshly dug earth, while bulldozers stood idle in a nearby olive grove.

Israel’s military chief last week warned that violence could break out if peace talks break down - a concern that was underscored by rioting in east Jerusalem after the shooting death of a Palestinian man Wednesday.

Violence broke out again Saturday, as Israeli riot troops clashed with Palestinian protesters demonstrating against a settlement near the West Bank city of Hebron. An Associated Press photographer was briefly detained and roughed up by security forces and suffered a broken rib. The army claimed that the photographer had refused calls to allow troops to operate.

In his U.N. address last week, Obama called on Israel to extend the moratorium, saying it “has made a difference on the ground and improved the atmosphere for talks.”

The U.N., European Union and Russia made similar pleas to extend the moratorium.

“Restoring the credibility of the peace process requires compelling the government of Israel to comply with its obligations and commitments,” Abbas said, “particularly to cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, especially in and around East Jerusalem, as well as the dismantling of the annexation apartheid wall.”

The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. They also object to the separation barrier built by Israelis between the West Bank and Israel to prevent deadly suicide bombings. Some parts of the barrier cut into Palestinian territory, leaving almost 10 percent of the West Bank on the Israeli side.

The Palestinians are split between Abbas’ Fatah movement, which governs the West Bank, and the Hamas rulers of Gaza, a coastal strip seized by the Islamic militant group three years ago. Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel and has denounced the U.S.-backed peacetalks as illegitimate.

As negotiations proceed in the U.S., there have been signs that both sides are willing to compromise.

Abbas, wary of being blamed for the talk’s collapse, told a group of American Jewish leaders earlier this month that he would not necessarily walk away from the negotiations even if settlement construction resumes. And senior Palestinian officials told The Associated Press that they are willing to show “some flexibility.”

Netanyahu has signaled that future construction will be far less than the thousands of new homes currently in the pipeline.

Information for this article was contributed by Ali Akbar Dareini, Matthew Lee, Diaa Hadid, Ian Dietch and Nasser Ishtayeh of The Associated Press; and by Bill Varner and Flavia Krause-Jackson, Gwen Ackerman, Saud Abu Ramadan and Jonathan Ferziger of Bloomberg News.; and by Edmund Sanders, Maher Abukhater and Batsheva Sobelman of the Los Angeles Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/26/2010

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