Israel’s freeze on building officially ends

REVAVA, West Bank — Jewish settlers released balloons and broke ground on a kindergarten in celebration Sunday as a 10-month construction slowdown expired, while U.S. and Israeli leaders tried to figure out how to keep Palestinians from walking out of peace talks over the end of the restrictions.

After the slowdown ran out at midnight, there was no Palestinian statement about the future of the talks. The Palestinians asked for an Oct. 4 meeting of an Arab League body to discuss the situation, possibly giving diplomats an extra week to work out a compromise.

Minutes after the expiration, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the Palestinians not to walk away, but instead to maintain constant contact “to achieve a historic framework accord within a year.” Ina statement, Netanyahu said his “intention to achieve peace is genuine.”

Palestinians have questioned whether they can make peace with Netanyahu,known as a hard-liner. Netanyahu heads a largely rightist, pro-settlement coalition that’s threatened to dissolve the parliament if he continues any form of settlement freeze.

Israel’s Environment Minister Gilad Erdan, a Likud member, said the prime minister wouldn’t have a Cabinet majority to extend the freeze.

Israeli settlers were not waiting, celebrating the end of the slowdown and planning to send bulldozers into action in two places in the West Bank early today.

In Revava, a settlement deep in the West Bank, about 2,000 activists released 2,000 balloons in the blue and white of the Israeli flag at sundown Sunday. The balloons were meant to symbolize the 2,000 apartments that settlers say are ready to be built immediately.

“Today it’s over and we will do everything we can to make sure it never happens again,” settler leader Dani Dayan told the crowd. “We return with new energy and a new determination to populate this land.”

It was unclear how the official end of the slowdown would affect construction. Netanyahu has already signaled future settlement construction will be kept to a minimum, in contrast to relatively unfettered housing activity of past Israeli governments.

The Palestinians have said they will quit the negotiations if Israel resumes building, though President Mahmoud Abbas said in a published interview Sunday in the pan-Arabic daily al-Hayat that he would consult with Arab partners first to weigh his options.

The settlers’ festivities went ahead despite Netanyahu’s call to show restraint as the curbs are lifted. Palestinians oppose all settlements built on territories they claim for a future state, and renewed building could endanger negotiations launched early this month by the Obama administration.

U.S. mediators raced to bridge the gap between the Israelis and Palestinians. But a deal was far from certain.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke Sunday with Netanyahu and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the representative of the “Quartet” of Mideast peacemakers, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said. He also said U.S. special Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell and Jeffrey Feltman, the State Department’s chief Mideast official, conferred with Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Sunday afternoon in New York.

“We keep pushing for the talks to continue,” Crowley said.

Abbas faces intense internal pressure from his supporters not to relax his conditions. Also, the rival Islamic Hamas, which controls Gaza, opposes peace talks with Israel in principle.

The deadline had not yet expired when several dozen settlers began a groundbreaking ceremony for a new kindergarten Sunday in the Kiryat Netafim settlement.

“For 10 months, you have been treated as second-class citizens,” Danny Danon, a pro-settler lawmaker in Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said at the ceremony. “Today, we return to build in all the land of Israel.”

In nearby Revava, a settlement of about 130 Orthodox Jewish families in the rocky hills of the northern West Bank, the crowd included young activists, men wearing trademark knit skullcaps favored by religious settlers and foreign supporters from Norway and China.

But Benny Katzover, head of the Samaria Settlers Committee, warned the crowd to be vigilant to prevent new restrictions from being imposed.

“I am afraid we must prepare for a struggle,” he said. “There is talk of a compromise.”

Netanyahu imposed the slowdown last November in a bid to draw the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. The Palestinians initially rejected the offer as insufficient, but in recent weeks they demanded that the measures remain in place.

The Palestinians say Israeli construction in the West Bank cripples plans for a viable Palestinian state. Some 300,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements, scattered among 2.5 million Palestinians. Another 180,000 Israelis live in east Jerusalem.

Israel has pledged previously to stop expanding settlements, but since the 1993 Oslo peace accords, the settler population in the West Bank has tripled. The U.S. opposes the settlements, and most of the international community deems the settlements as illegal.

Israel says settlements don’t run afoul of international law because the territory wasn’t recognized as belonging to anyone before the 1967 war, in which Israel prevailed, and therefore isn’t occupied.

Israel has built about 120 settlements in the West Bank since the late 1960s. Another 100 smaller settlements, which Israel calls outposts, were built during the past decade.

Palestinians say it was a mistake not to demand a settlement freeze earlier, noting that as negotiations dragged on for years, settlements ate up land and resources they want for a future state. Negotiating for statehood while settlements expand is “a serious contradiction in terms,” Arab League Chief Amr Moussa told reporters this weekend.

Israelis, on the other hand, accuse Palestinians of wasting the last 10 months of Israel’s self-imposed settlement moratorium by refusing face-to-face negotiations until this month. Now, Netanyahu is insisting that the settlement question be dealt with during negotiations, not as a precondition.

In practice, the slowdown brought about only a slight drop of about 10 percent in ongoing construction, but it cut new housing starts by about 50 percent, according to the dovish Israeli group Peace Now. That means the slowdown could have far more impact if it remained in place.

In a television interview, settler leader Dayan acknowledged it would take time for work to really begin.

“Whoever thinks that tomorrow there will be some kind of earthquake and there will be bulldozers wherever you look is wrong. That is not going to happen. It’s a process and takes a while,” he said.

Clinton held talks with senior Israeli and Palestinian officials over the weekend in hopes of forging a deal on settlement construction.

Before boarding a plane back to Israel, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the BBC late Sunday that chances of success were “50-50.” The chief Israeli and Palestinian negotiators remained in the U.S., leaving a window open for a last-minute agreement.

One of Obama’s chief advisers, David Axelrod, told ABC News that efforts were continuing.

“We’re very eager to keep these talks going,” he said. “We are going to urge and urge and push throughout this day to - to get some kind of resolution.”

Despite the tensions, there have been signs of compromise.

Officials in Netanyahu’s office said he continued meeting with his advisers late into Sunday night to examine compromises that would impose a partial freeze in the larger settlement blocs and limit the expansion of smaller outposts.

Senior Palestinian officials, speaking anonymously, have said they’d likely consider some sort of compromise, though officially they’ve said that they’d await the results of the current round of discussions and convene the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Arab League to issue a joint response to any proposed compromises.

Abbas ruled out a violent response.

“We won’t go back to that again,” he said.

Also on Sunday, Israeli police said Palestinian gunmen shot and lightly wounded an Israeli motorist in Hebron, close to where a deadly shooting earlier this month killed four Israeli settlers.

Information for this article was contributed by Aron Heller, Matti Friedman, Dalia Nammari, Matthew Lee and Fisnik Abrashi of The Associated Press; by Edmund Sanders and Batsheva Sobelman of the Los Angeles Times;

by Sheera Frenkel of McClatchy Newspapers; and by Gwen Ackerman, Flavia Krause-Jackson, Bill Varner and Saud Abu Ramadan of The Washington Post.