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Netanyahu and Kerry meet to discuss Palestinian U.N. bid Israel, Palestinians gird for showdown over U.N. resolution on withdrawal
(about 7 hours later)
ROME — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to meet U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry here Monday in hastily arranged talks after Palestinian officials announced that they will put a resolution before the U.N. Security Council outlining a timetable for a final peace deal with Israel. Israel and the Palestinians are girding for a showdown at the United Nations this week over a resolution that would recognize a Palestinian state and demand an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory in less than two years.
The Palestinians announced late Sunday that the Jordanian-backed resolution, which sets a November 2016 deadline for an Israeli retreat from land sought for a Palestinian state, would be submitted by Wednesday, news reports said. The Palestinian leadership, frustrated after two decades of peace talks that have failed to bring them statehood, announced they will submit the resolution to the Security Council on Wednesday.
Netanyahu said he will tell Kerry that Israel strongly opposes any attempt to impose a two-year deadline for it to withdraw to lines it held before the 1967 Middle East war. “Israel won’t accept any unilateral, time-defined measures,” Netanyahu told reporters before boarding his plane to Rome, according to the Bloomberg News agency. “We will repulse all efforts to bring terrorism into our home.” It is likely doomed from the start.
Kerry is meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Europe to try to find a way forward. He is due to meet senior Palestinian officials in London on Tuesday. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat allowed on Monday that the measure, which sets a November 2016 deadline for an Israeli withdrawal from land sought for a Palestinian state, does not yet have the support by a majority of Security Council members. And even if they did win the vote, it would likely be vetoed by the United States, one of five permanent members with veto power.
Both Israel and the United States have said that Palestinian statehood should be negotiated, not forced through U.N. resolutions. The United States has used its veto power in the Security Council dozens of times to back Israel. It could be less eager to do so now after several Western European allies recently endorsed Palestinian statehood. Israelis are relying again on the United States to act as a buffer at the United Nations.
The European endorsements carry no weight, but they increase pressure on Israel to try to resolve the decades-long conflict with the Palestinians. European sympathy for the Palestinian cause was heightened this summer after hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed during the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. “Let it be clear: they won’t get what they want,” said former justice minister and chief Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni, according to the Jerusalem Post. “The Palestinian proposal won’t be accepted. The world will reject this text. And, if necessary, the U.S. will use its veto power.”
Palestinian officials say they have been working with European countries, primarily France, on the resolution, according to news reports. Jordan has circulated the draft resolution to the 15-member Security Council. Palestinian officials said France is drafting an alternative resolution, Bloomberg News reported. Although the United States has vetoed dozens of resolutions deemed anti-Israel in the past, this one comes at a particularly difficult time. Several Arab states that are sympathetic to the Palestinian position are part of the coalition battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and Washington is relying on their cooperation to keep the coalition from being exclusively Western.
The U.N. campaign, one of several the Palestinians have tried in the past few years, comes as violence between the two sides has soared recently over access to a contested holy site in Jerusalem. Trying to avert a confrontation over the resolution, Secretary of State John F. Kerry summoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a three-hour meeting in Rome Monday.
It also comes a few months before Israel holds recently called early elections, in which polls suggest Netanyahu is not assured of winning a fourth term. Kerry made no statement after the meeting, instead leaving for Paris to meet with the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and the European Union. On Tuesday, he is scheduled to be in London to talk with Erekat and the head of the Arab League, which has proposed its own peace initiative.
Kerry, speaking recently in Bogota, Colombia, said he wanted to “help defuse the tensions” and reduce the potential for more conflict, according to remarks posted on the State Department’s Web site. Before heading back to Israel, Netanyahu thanked Kerry but declined to say whether Kerry had promised the United States would use its veto.
The Palestinians say they have turned to the United Nations out of frustration after more than 20 years of failed peacemaking efforts, for which Israel blames the Palestinians and the Palestinians blames Israel. “I very much appreciate the secretary of state’s efforts to prevent a deterioration in the region,” Netanyahu said. “I said that the attempts of the Palestinians and of several European countries to force conditions on Israel will only lead to a deterioration in the regional situation and will endanger Israel. Therefore, we will strongly oppose this.”
The Palestinians want to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, territories that Israel captured in the 1967 war, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinian resolution calls on Israel to withdraw to lines it held before the 1967 war, a demarcation that would place tens of thousands of Israeli settlers over the line, even if the two sides agreed to swap land. In an indication of how facts on the ground have fueled Palestinian frustrations, newly released Israeli figures show the settler population in the West Bank has more than doubled in the 21 years since Israel and the Palestinians started their negotiations, rising to more than 350,000 settlers.
“We are in a confrontation now with the U.S. because it doesn’t support our U.N. Security Council move,” Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki told the official Voice of Palestine radio on Sunday. “The U.S. wants us to postpone this move until after the Israeli elections,” he said. The latest round of talks, brokered by Kerry, collapsed in April. Both the United States and Israel say Palestinian statehood cannot be declared unilaterally or forced through U.N. resolutions but must be negotiated with Israel, whose troops still patrol most of the West Bank. Parliaments in several European nations recently endorsed Palestinian statehood, though the votes are mostly symbolic.
Later Monday, Kerry is due to travel to Paris and then on to London to meet Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and a delegation from the Arab League. Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the U.N., called the resolution a “last door” to a peaceful compromise on the conflict.
In Gaza on Sunday, Hamas paraded hundreds of its armed fighters and truck-mounted rockets through the streets as the group celebrated its 27th anniversary. It was Hamas’s largest show of force since the summer war. “It’s becoming clear, two options are available to us,” he said. “One is to open the door for peace by adopting a resolution in the Security Council. The other option is devastating. A religious war, with extremists on both sides.”
Gilead Sher, chief of staff to Ehud Barak when Barak was prime minister, and now co-chair of Blue White Future, a group advocating a two-state solution, said the resolution would not help bring both sides closer to lasting solution, or even back to the negotiating table.
“The United States should get its act together and provide the parties with a ladder to get down from the height of that conflicting, diplomatic struggle that is currently underway,” he said.
Booth reported from Jerusalem. Ruth Eglash in Jerusalem contributed to this report.