Quartet gathers to revive talks

Three of the four mediating partners disagreed with a recent disengagement plan.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Four would-be peacemakers who offered the road map Middle East peace plan are urgently seeking to reinvigorate negotiations after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's political party rejected his offer to abandon Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Only the United States was enthusiastic in the first place about Sharon's idea, which would have withdrawn Israeli troops and all 7,500 settlers from the Gaza Strip and undertaken a partial pullback from the West Bank.
The other partners of the self-styled Quartet -- the United Nations, the European Union and Russia -- while aware that their joint road map to peace talks was languishing, preferred a much larger withdrawal and other changes.
The Bush administration held its ground Monday. The White House reaffirmed its support for what spokesman Scott McClellan called Sharon's proposal bold and said staff-level talks had begun with Israel to determine how to move forward.
Later, a senior Bush administration official speaking on condition of anonymity said Bush would not try to put the plan back on track.
Party vote
On Sunday, Sharon's Likud party voted against his plan 60 percent to 40 percent in a nonbinding referendum. That sent the prime minister back to the drawing board to develop a scaled-down version that might get by Likud but would be even more unlikely to attract the support of the Palestinians or their Arab and European supporters.
With no winning alternative immediately in sight, U.N. Ambassador Kofi Annan was hosting the Quartet today that was bound to restate determination to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in a way that sets up a Palestinian state on land the Arabs lost in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was attending with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and a group of senior European Union diplomats: Javier Solana, Chris Patten and Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen.
At the State Department, spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday the administration thinks Sharon's disengagement plan could represent a way to move the road map forward. "It will be up to Mr. Sharon to decide how to proceed," Boucher said.
Looking beyond the Likud party vote to the goal of the road map itself, Boucher said the Israelis widely support "the idea of moving forward and the idea of withdrawing from Gaza."
Implying that despite its support for Sharon's initiative, the Bush administration was leaving its diplomatic options open, Boucher said: "I don't think we have hitched our wagon to any single effort."
International reaction
Sharon won President Bush's support for the plan at a White House meeting last month. Bush backed the Israeli leader on two key issues. He said new realities since 1967 -- the 225,000 Israeli Jews who have established communities on the West Bank -- suggest some Jewish settlements ought to remain on there as part of an overall agreement with the Palestinians.
Bush also rejected Arab demands for a "right of return" that would resettle in Israel some Palestinians who contend their families were expelled during the establishment of Israel in 1948.
By contrast, the United Nations, European governments and Russia support the Arabs in insisting that Israel relinquish all of Gaza, all of the West Bank and part of Jerusalem to the Palestinians.
Fred Eckhard, the U.N. spokesman, referring to Sharon's proposal, said Monday that Annan thought "any withdrawal should clearly lead to an end of [Israel's] occupation and be carried out as part of the Quartet's road map in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority."
Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.