In a cautious sign of progress in the long-stalled Middle East peace process, Israeli and Palestinian leaders accepted a U.S.-brokered timetable Thursday that could restart the clock toward a resumption of talks if there is no violence for a full week.
Acknowledging the difficulties in avoiding violence between the two sides, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a major concession to a Palestinian position, said the U.S. would support deploying outside monitors to make sure the combatants pull back from nine months of bloody fighting. Israel opposes European or UN monitors but signaled it may accept a U.S. group.
Under the agreement brokered by Powell in separate talks Thursday with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the road back to the peace table would begin after seven days with no acts of violence by either side.
The clock could have started ticking Thursday, officials said, except for the latest episode, an ambush, apparently by Palestinian extremists, of a car driven by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. An Israeli mother was shot and killed in the attack. The Israeli settlements have been a flash point in the violence that has claimed some 600 lives, more than 80 percent of them Palestinian.
Sharon and Powell condemned the attack, and Sharon blamed it on a Palestinian group under Arafat’s control. But even so, U.S. and Israeli diplomats made clear that if there is no violence Friday, that will mark the first day of the seven-day period that could eventually move Israelis and Palestinians back to direct negotiations.
“We are all committed to peace,” Sharon said in a news conference with Powell. “Today a meeting was held in which the positions were clarified.”
Cooling-off period next
If the Israelis and the Palestinians, with all their various factions, can somehow avoid violence for a week, the next step would be a six-week “cooling-off period” during which Israelis and Palestinians would continue the cease-fire and take some steps at cooperation on security matters.
After that, they would enter a period of some months when specific steps would be taken, such as a freeze on Israeli settlement activity in the Palestinian territories. Once all that was accomplished, the two sides could resume peace talks that came to an abrupt end last September when violence erupted, Sharon said.
Virtually all of these steps were laid out in detail in a report by an international committee headed by former Sen. George Mitchell, a report accepted in principle last month by the Israelis and Palestinians and embraced by the Bush administration as a blueprint for peace.
The key Israeli concession Thursday came when Sharon told Powell that the initial period of quiet could be seven days instead of 10, as the Israeli leader had earlier demanded, and that the counting could begin on the first new day free from violence.
“The seven days begin on a day of tranquility,” Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said after the evening meeting between Powell and Sharon. “It could start from tomorrow.”
But Sharon refused to budge from his demand that there be a complete cessation of violence, not just a relatively calm period. That high standard means that potentially any act of violence–a rock-throwing incident, a clash with border guards–could force the parties to start the process and the lengthy timetable all over again.
Total end to violence sought
Sharon insisted on “a full and absolute cessation of terrorist incidents, violence and incitement” before he would start the clock. While the Palestinians have been eager to get back to the peace table, Sharon has emphasized instead the immediate importance of security to Israel over resuming negotiations.
Powell said the shooting of the Israeli settler “reminds us all over again how we must move forward and get this violence ended … how we must move forward toward peace.”
Powell won Palestinian support for the complex formula earlier in the day in a meeting in Arafat’s West Bank headquarters in Ramallah.
“We are completely committed to the peace process,” Arafat said, using almost the exact words Sharon would use a few hours later. “I am sure that our people will follow up what I am promising … no doubt.”
In his joint news conference with Arafat, Powell addressed the idea of a monitoring group to act as a sort of truth squad in the field to ensure the parties are abiding by their commitments.
“I think there is a clear understanding of the need for some kind of monitoring observer function performed by some group,” Powell said in response to a reporter’s question.
Powell would not say who would do the monitoring or what kind of arms, if any, they would carry.
The issue of monitors
The Palestinians have asked for U.S., United Nations or European monitors for years, insisting that some sort of buffer between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would reduce violence and, more pointedly, help bolster their claims that Israeli settlers often incite clashes.
Israel has adamantly opposed monitors as an infringement on its sovereignty and as a political gambit by the Palestinians.
The Israelis particularly distrust the UN, which they regard as tilting toward the Palestinians.
A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Powell is examining options for an observer group headed by the U.S. and possibly including Palestinian and Israeli representatives, with no Europeans taking part. Israeli officials have indicated privately that they are willing to consider that idea, the official said.
But the U.S. official downplayed the importance of the topic in this week’s talks, and Powell said he did not directly raise the issue in his conversations with Arafat and Sharon but was merely responding to a journalist’s question.
Beyond the Mitchell report
Powell’s support for international monitors showed a willingness by the Bush administration to consider ideas beyond the Mitchell report, which said there was no point in considering monitors as long as Israel was opposed. The U.S. support for monitors also indicated that the Bush administration agrees with the Palestinian contention that monitors may reduce violence.
Powell traveled to Ramallah, a few miles north of Jerusalem, in a motorcade of bulletproof vehicles under tight security. Armed Israeli guards handed off the motorcade to their Palestinian counterparts at a checkpoint marking one of the key border crossings between Israel and the West Bank.
Amid an already tense cease-fire, the stage is not yet set for confidence building or monitors, Powell said, but may be “in the very near future.”
“As we get into the confidence-building phase, there will be a need for monitors and observers to see what’s happening on the ground, to serve as interlocutors to go to points of friction and make an independent observation of what has happened,” Powell said.
Just three months ago, the Bush administration vetoed a Palestinian-backed proposal made to the UN Security Council that would have endorsed an international buffer force. But the key word was “force.” Israel adamantly opposes any sort of armed observer force.
The possibility of an unarmed U.S.-led monitoring group with some Israeli and Palestinian representation was first broached by the Clinton administration in 1998 at the talks that led to the Wye Agreement, an interim Israeli-Palestinian accord.
