Israeli and Palestinian leaders tackle contentious issues

The Israeli and Palestinian leaders today tackled the core issues that have tormented would-be Mideast peacemakers for decades – Palestinian refugees, final borders and the fate of Jerusalem.

It was the first time Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas addressed these issues in depth – and represented an important building block for a US-sponsored international peace conference in November.

Olmert has met several times with Abbas in the past few months, but has been reluctant to take on the most contentious issues dividing the two sides, preferring to focus on general outlines. Israel’s approach has riled the Palestinians, who want to go straight to the core questions of Palestinian statehood.

Heading into the meeting at Olmert’s Jerusalem residence, Abbas warned that an international Mideast peace conference this fall would be a “waste of time” if the big three issues were glossed over. After the talks were over, both sides confirmed that Israel had swept aside its reluctance to address them.

“These core issues have to be discussed on the way to finding a diplomatic solution of two states for two peoples,” an official in the prime minister’s office quoted Olmert as saying.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the two leaders did not go into the nitty-gritty of the contentious questions, or prepare written documents. But he declared that the time has come for action, not talk.

“We are at a stage to reach decisions,” Erekat said.

As he entered Olmert’s Jerusalem residence for their talks, Abbas signed the guest book in Arabic with a wish for peace between the two peoples, the official in Olmert’s office said.

The two sides hope by late October to come up with a framework for ending the conflict and creating a Palestinian state, he added.

The biggest obstacles have been what the final borders of a future Palestinian state would look like; whether Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s creation would be allowed to return to their original homes in Israel along with their descendants; and whether the holy city of Jerusalem could be shared. Failure to reach agreement on these issues has scuttled decades of peace efforts.

US President George Bush has called for a Mideast peace conference, expected to take place in November, to advance a final Israeli-Palestinian accord.

A successful outcome of the international conference is far from assured. The violent seizure of the Gaza Strip by Islamic Hamas militants in June created duelling governments, with Hamas ruling Gaza and Abbas loyalists in charge in the West Bank.

And with Gaza militants firing rockets at Israel almost daily and Israelis disappointed by Olmert’s performance during last year’s botched war in Lebanon, the Israeli leader might not be able to make the sweeping territorial concessions a final accord would demand.

Still, prospects for peacemaking have been boosted by Abbas’ dismissal of the government led by Hamas, which killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings.

And the key players in this drama – Olmert, Abbas and the Iraq-weakened Bush - all appear to be hungry for some kind of diplomatic achievement.

Ahead of the meeting, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported Tuesday that the two sides agreed to set up negotiating teams to advance the talks.

Haaretz said Olmert would insist on adhering to the phased approach of the US-sponsored “road map” peace plan of 2003, which called for the disbanding of Palestinian militant groups at the outset and the establishment of a Palestinian state in stages.

The road map foundered shortly after it was presented because both sides failed to carry out initial obligations.

Olmert made it clear to Abbas in their meeting that Israel would break off all peacemaking if the Palestinian leader brought Hamas into his government, the Israeli official said. Hamas, isolated because of its violently anti-Israel ideology and its bloody takeover of Gaza, is interested in finding an accommodation with Abbas’ West Bank-based government.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said the Olmert-Abbas meetings would spell the end of Palestinian aspirations to statehood.

“These meetings work to promote internal strife by distracting Palestinian efforts and hindering the establishment of a political system based on purely Palestinian decisions, far from American-Zionist domination,” Barhoum said in a statement.

After nightfall Tuesday, an Israeli aircraft fired two missiles at abandoned structures on the coast next to Gaza City, Hamas officials said. No one was hurt. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

Israeli government spokesman David Baker said Olmert and Abbas discussed ways to strengthen Abbas’ security forces and plans to convene a committee of Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian and US security officials to examine ways to stop weapons smuggling from Egypt into Gaza.

Olmert told Abbas he would soon present a plan Israeli security officials are drawing up to permit greater freedom of movement within the West Bank, where travel is severely restricted by Israeli roadblocks, Baker said.

A joint Palestinian-Israeli economic council will be launched, apparently in October in Tel Aviv, in the presence of Olmert, Abbas and international Mideast envoy Tony Blair, he added.