Israel Postpones Decision On Pullback
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet President Clinton in Washington on Tuesday without a government decision on how much of the occupied West Bank Israel would be willing to hand over to the Palestinians in another troop redeployment.
The Israeli Cabinet voted Sunday to postpone a decision on the scope of a pullback until Netanyahu’s return, hoping to give the prime minister more flexibility in negotiations.
“It is clear that if we had set a number, it would have elicited immediate public responses from the Palestinians and perhaps from the Americans. That would not have served my aims,” Netanyahu told reporters after the Cabinet meeting.
The Clinton administration has been pushing for a significant pullback from at least 10 percent of the occupied lands, and originally it had hoped to get specifics from Netanyahu on the second of three additional redeployments that Israel agreed to carry out under the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.
Israeli media said Netanyahu will offer either two limited pullbacks or a double-digit pullback in return for canceling the third redeployment and moving directly to final peace negotiations.
Israeli government officials refused to confirm the specifics.
The government did reiterate its decision of last week making a pullback conditional on the Palestinians’ compliance with their commitments under the peace accords. That resolution listed about 50 steps the Palestinians “must take” before Israel will withdraw further, including a thorough and consistent crackdown on Islamic extremists violently opposed to the peace process.
Also last week, the right-wing Cabinet voted to keep large swaths of the West Bank and strategic resources under Israeli control in any final agreement with the Palestinians.
xxxx The West Bank History: Part of Ottoman Empire and later British Palestine, the area was earmarked for the heart of an Arab Palestinian state in the 1947 U.N. plan partitioning the region between Arabs and Jews. Jordan seized the West Bank in the 1948 war; Israel took it in the 1967 war. Area: 2,300 square miles. Population: Estimated 1.6 million Palestinians living in eight main towns, including Nablus, Ramallah, Jericho, Bethlehem and Hebron, and several hundred villages. About 150,000 Israelis living in 144 settlements, the largest of which are Maaleh Adumim, Ariel and Kiryat Arba.