Sides dig in ahead of Palestinian UN bid

Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS

Israelis and Palestinians dug into positions that have bedeviled negotiations for years, a troubling prelude to the expected showdown over Palestinian statehood at the United Nations today.

The United States has been spearheading international efforts to defuse the Palestinians’ plan to ask the U.N. Security Council to recognize an independent Palestinian state encompassing the Israeli-occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, ruled by Palestinian Hamas militants.

International mediators have argued that only through negotiations, and not by international dictates, can this most- intractable of Mideast conflicts be resolved. But the hardened positions augured ill for the prospect of talks’ resuming any time soon.

But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has rebuffed all efforts to sway him from the statehood bid and said he would submit the application to U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon today as planned. A top aide, Mohammed Ishtayeh, said Abbas has asked Ban and the Security Council’s Lebanese president this month to process the application without delay.

His willingness to risk a threatened U.S. veto in the council has given a big boost to his popularity at home, reflecting the deep exasperation of the Palestinian people after 44 years of Israeli occupation — and a deep distrust of Washington, which the Palestinians view as biased toward Israel.

An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomacy, said there was no talk about halting Jewish settlement construction on lands the Palestinians claim for a future state. A senior Palestinian official insisted the Palestinians would not return to the bargaining table without assurances that Israel would halt settlement building and drop its opposition to basing negotiations on the borders it held before capturing the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza in 1967.

“We made lots of concessions over the years. It’s time the Israelis make the concessions,” Nabil Shaath, a top aide to Abbas, told The Associated Press.

Another senior Abbas aide, Azzam Ahmed, ruled out a New York meeting between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had proposed the two sit down together on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session this week.

At last year’s General Assembly meeting, President Barack Obama eloquently expressed his hope of seeing a Palestinian state by now. But talks meant to produce that state broke down last September after three short weeks, after an Israeli moratorium on new settlement construction expired.