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Palestinians Make a Surprise Move, and Mideast Talks Falter
Hope for Negotiations Stays Alive in Mideast
(about 11 hours later)
JERUSALEM — Surprising the United States and Israel, the Palestinian leadership formally submitted applications on Wednesday to join 15 international agencies, leaving the troubled Middle East talks brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry on the verge of breakdown.
JERUSALEM — The Palestinian leadership on Wednesday formally submitted applications to join 15 international conventions and treaties despite opposition from the United States and Israel, reflecting a deep crisis in Middle East peace talks. Yet all three parties appeared ready to seek a formula for continuing the negotiations.
The applications were signed by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority on Tuesday evening as part of a move to gain the benefits of statehood outside the negotiation process.
A three-way meeting between American, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators was said to be taking place Wednesday night in Jerusalem. Secretary of State John Kerry, who brokered the start of the talks last July and has remained intimately involved, spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority by telephone from Brussels.
They were delivered on Wednesday morning to Robert Serry, the United Nations special coordinator in the region, and, in relevant cases, to representatives of Switzerland and the Netherlands, according to Palestinian officials.
A senior State Department official said that while it would be “shortsighted and premature” to make any predictions, “we will spend the next few days continuing to discuss with both parties the options for the path ahead.”
Riyad al-Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, delivered the letters to Mr. Serry at a meeting in the West Bank city of Jericho between Mr. Serry and Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office maintained an official silence through Wednesday suggesting Israel had no interest in inflaming the situation. But experts said there was likely to be some practical Israeli reaction, possibly taking the form of announcements of more settlement construction or withholding the transfer of tax revenues that the Israelis collect on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.
Saskia Ramming, a spokeswoman for Mr. Serry, said the letters would be relayed to the appropriate body for each of the 15 treaties and conventions the Palestinians want to join, adding that there is “a whole procedure involved” in examining the documents. “You basically submit that you want to accede and then it goes to the depository and there’s a process of review,” Ms. Ramming said. “To say this takes effect tomorrow, that’s a bit misleading.”
Tzipi Livni, the Israeli government’s negotiator, wrote on her Facebook page on Wednesday night that the latest Palestinian moves were “not encouraging” but that she was engaged in a determined effort to keep the “difficult and complex” negotiations going.
Muhammad Shtayyeh, a senior adviser to Mr. Abbas and a former negotiator, said that the Palestinian move was a reaction to Israel’s failure to release a fourth batch of long-serving Palestinian prisoners by last Saturday and that the time for additional diplomatic maneuvering had run out.
Palestinian officials and analysts described the move led by Mr. Abbas as a carefully calculated one born largely of domestic considerations, meant to salvage credibility in the eyes of his jaded public, not to derail the peace process. The Palestine Liberation Organization’s negotiations department said in a statement that “The P.L.O. remains committed to this nine-month process, which ends on April 29.”
“We waited three days, from March 29 until April 1, to give American diplomacy a chance and to give the Israelis a chance,” Mr. Shtayyeh said.
That gives American mediators almost another month to try to work out a deal for the extension of talks that have so far yielded little progress, but have the stated goal of the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Mr. Abbas’s actions, which appeared to catch American and Israeli officials by surprise, Mr. Kerry to cancel a planned return to the region on Wednesday, in which he had expected to complete an agreement extending negotiations through 2015.
The American administration appeared focused on containing the situation with even-handedness. The State Department official said of the Israelis and Palestinians, “Both sides have taken unhelpful steps over the last 24 hours.”
In that planned deal, the United States would release from prison Jonathan J. Pollard, an American convicted of spying for Israel more than 25 years ago, while Israel would free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and slow construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
For the Palestinians, the crisis was precipitated by what they said was an Israeli violation of a commitment to release a fourth batch of long-serving Palestinian security prisoners by March 29. Mr. Abbas had pledged not to seek membership in international bodies for the nine months allotted for the negotiations, in return for the release of prisoners. But Israel had delayed the release while it tried to seal a broader, American-brokered deal to extend the negotiations through to the beginning of 2015.
Mr. Abbas, who had vowed not to seek membership in international bodies until the April 29 expiration of the talks that Mr. Kerry started last summer, said he was taking this course because Israel had failed to release the fourth batch of Palestinian prisoners.
Palestinian officials were further enraged on Tuesday when the Israeli government reissued bids for the construction of more than 700 housing units in Gilo, an area of Jerusalem that Israel captured in the 1967 war and that the Palestinians claim as part of a future state. The construction tenders were first issued late last year and again in January but they failed to attract any bids from developers.
Israeli officials say they are not bound by their pledge because no meaningful negotiations have taken place since November.
On Tuesday evening a gathering of about 50 members of the Palestinian top leadership voted unanimously to take immediate steps to join the 15 conventions and treaties including the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Hague Convention respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
American officials, while rattled, said the Palestinians appeared to be using leverage against Israel rather than trying to scuttle the negotiations. Mr. Abbas, they noted, did not move toward joining the International Criminal Court, a step Israel fears most because the Palestinians could use the court to contest Israel’s presence in the West Bank.
“It was necessary to do something to appease the Palestinian street,” Ziad Abu Amr, a deputy prime minister in the Palestinian Authority government and a close aide to Mr. Abbas, said in a telephone interview.
Still, a senior American official said Mr. Kerry’s decision not to return to the region immediately reflected a growing impatience in the White House, which believes that his mediating efforts have reached their limit and that the two sides need to work their way out of the current impasse.
“Nothing has changed regarding the Palestinians’ basic attitude and commitments,” he said, but he suggested that the way back to talks would be fraught with complications.
In announcing the moves on Tuesday, Mr. Abbas said, “This is our right.” He has been under pressure from other Palestinian leaders and the public to leverage the nonmember observer-state status they won at the United Nations in 2012 to join a total of 63 international bodies.
Before the latest Palestinian move Israeli officials had spoken of an emerging deal involving the imminent release by the United States of an American jailed for spying for Israel in the 1980s; the release of the fourth batch of prisoners and an additional 400 Palestinian prisoners who had not committed murder; and a slowdown in settlement activity in the West Bank — though not applying to areas of Jerusalem like Gilo.
“We do not want to use this right against anybody or to confront anybody,” he said as he signed the membership applications live on Palestinian television. “We don’t want to collide with the U.S. administration. We want a good relationship with Washington because it helped us and exerted huge efforts. But because we did not find ways for a solution, this becomes our right.”
Mr. Abu Amr said those terms were unacceptable and that he did not believe the Palestinians would go back to negotiations without a total Israeli freeze of settlement construction.
The United States voted against the Palestinians’ 2012 bid in the United Nations General Assembly, and it blocked a similar effort in 2011 at the Security Council, arguing that negotiations with Israel were the only path to peace and statehood.
Muhammad Shtayyeh, another senior aide to Mr. Abbas and a former member of the Palestinian negotiating team, said the Israeli stalling over the prisoner release had been “humiliating,” adding, “This is a matter of dignity for the Palestinian people.”
Washington has also vigorously opposed Palestinian membership in the international agencies, which under a law passed by Congress could prompt a withdrawal of financial aid to the Palestinian Authority and a shutdown of the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington.
Mr. Abbas has been under increasing internal pressure of late, even from within his own Fatah party, and has been criticized for engaging in an open feud with a onetime ally who Mr. Abbas now sees as a rival, Muhammad Dahlan, a former Gaza strongman and Fatah security chief. With Gaza under the control of Hamas, the Islamic militant group, and Palestinian elections long overdue, many Palestinians also question Mr. Abbas’s legitimacy as a ruler and decision-maker.
While the Palestinians’ pursuit of the international route is widely viewed as a poison pill for the peace talks, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Kerry held out hope on Tuesday night that they could still be salvaged. The agencies Mr. Abbas moved to join include the Geneva and Vienna Conventions and those dealing with women’s and children’s rights.
“He has a lot of holes in his sack,” said Zakaria Zakaria al-Qaq, a Palestinian expert in national security at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.
“It is completely premature tonight to draw any kind of judgment, certainly any kind of final judgment, about today’s events and where things are,” Mr. Kerry told reporters in Brussels, where he was meeting with NATO foreign ministers on the Ukrainian crisis.
Kamel Husseini, a Palestinian public relations expert, said that the release of prisoners was the only thing that the peace process had delivered so far and that after the delay “Palestinian public opinion would not tolerate business as usual.” Mr. Abbas’s move, he said, was “bold but not reckless.”
“I’m not going to get into the who, why, what, when, where, how of why we’re where we are today,” he added. “The important thing is to keep the process moving and find a way to see whether the parties are prepared to move forward.”
Israeli experts and analysts agreed that the Palestinian move was calibrated to avoid a major breakdown of the peace process.
“Even tonight,” Mr. Kerry said, “both parties say they want to continue to try to find a way forward.”
Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli minister and peace negotiator, described the latest events as “a side story.”
President Obama has given Mr. Kerry broad latitude to try to keep the process alive, even authorizing him to discuss the possible release of Mr. Pollard, a former Navy intelligence officer serving a life sentence in the United States for espionage, whose release Israel has long sought. That would only be as part of a broader package of measures that American officials said would give the negotiations a genuine chance to succeed.
“The Palestinians themselves are not foolish enough to believe that this is really a significant political step,” he said. “It is also not a punishment for Israel. What are we going to pay for it or suffer for it? It is a very artificial game here. They will not gain and we will not lose.”
Such a move would antagonize the nation’s intelligence agencies, senior officials said, but might be worth the cost to keep the talks from collapsing. Mr. Pollard is eligible for parole in 2015, they noted, so his value as a bargaining chip is diminishing.
With the gaps still wide, there is deep skepticism on both sides that the talks will actually result in a solution for the Israel-Palestinian conflict, even with an extension.
Mr. Obama, officials said, was in frequent contact with Mr. Kerry when both were in Europe last week, and during Mr. Kerry’s travels there this week. The president has rejected previous pleas by the Israelis to release Mr. Pollard, but with Mr. Kerry having invested so deeply in the peace process, officials said, Mr. Obama wanted to back him up.
“In the end of the day some formula will be adopted and the process will continue, although it has no chance to succeed,” said Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser now at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. Neither side wanted to be blamed for destroying a process that is “so dear and so important for John Kerry,” he said.
Whether, and how, to use Mr. Pollard has been vigorously debated within the administration. While some officials argue that he should be used only to break the logjam on final-status issues — the borders of a new Palestinian state, for example — Mr. Kerry has argued that these issues will all be decided as a package at the end of the talks. Mr. Kerry has argued that Mr. Pollard can be more useful now in keeping the talks alive, given the possibility of parole, according to officials.
Mr. Qaq said that if the prisoner issue can be unlocked, “we will be back to normalcy, meaning the usual stalemate.”
Still, the crisis is the most significant yet for talks that have been troubled from the start, with few beyond Mr. Kerry and his team believing that there is much chance of closing the gaps in the two sides’ positions. Mr. Kerry has made the peace process a personal mission, with a dozen trips to the region in the past year, interrupting his efforts to counter Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine.
While Middle East analysts widely praised Mr. Kerry’s determination, many thought he was on a fool’s errand. He long ago abandoned his original goal of achieving a final-status agreement within nine months, and in recent weeks he even de-emphasized his proposed framework of core principles for a deal, focusing instead on merely extending the timetable.
“It’s a process leading nowhere,” Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster and political scientist, said on Tuesday morning. “The basic compromises that this Israeli government is willing to endorse are unacceptable to the majority of the Palestinians.” He added, “There is no chance.”
Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel, said: “All of the indications are that this is moribund. We’re now into Plan B, which has two parts: the blame game, which is well underway, and a last-ditch effort by the United States not to have the collapse lead to violence.”
Israeli officials remained silent about Mr. Abbas’s move Tuesday night. A spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to discuss it, or how it might affect the deal that had emerged earlier in the day to continue the talks for at least another nine months.
Mr. Abbas’s actions came after a frenzied day of rumors in Israel, where officials said a deal was emerging in which Mr. Pollard would be freed before the Passover holiday, which starts on April 14. Israel would free the remaining long-serving prisoners — including 14 Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose release is particularly delicate because it raises questions of sovereignty — as well as 400 others, many of them women and children, who had not committed murder.
In addition, Israel would promise to “show restraint” in settlement construction, according to an official involved in the negotiations, by not starting new government housing projects in the West Bank. Projects underway would be allowed to continue, the official said, and East Jerusalem would not be included.
