WASHINGTON - In trying to push Israelis and Palestinians toward a permanent, formal peace, the Bush administration is debating whether to use the borders that existed between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza before the 1967 Arab-Israel war as a starting point for talks, officials said yesterday.
An American endorsement of the 1967 borders, even with modifications, would likely draw strong opposition from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who views those as indefensible.
Sharon has championed the building and expansion of Jewish settlements in the territories captured during the 1967 war as a way to ensure the borders would be permanently changed.
But an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 border lies at the heart of the peace proposal put forward earlier this year by Saudi Arabia and endorsed by the 22-nation Arab League.
Recent polls in Israel suggest it would win support from many Israelis as part of a U.S.-backed peace agreement that would bring an end to Palestinian violence and terrorism.
The debate over the so-called Green Line is key to the administration's plans to develop American proposals that set the stage for renewed peace negotiations and an end to more than 22 months of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.
American involvement in the conflict grew this week with the arrival in Washington of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whom the White House hopes will play a key role in pressuring the Palestinians to crack down on terrorism and reform their institutions in preparation for statehood.
Mubarak met over lunch yesterday with Vice President Dick Cheney and will join President Bush at Camp David today and tomorrow.
U.S. officials also acted to ensure that no harm came to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during Israel's incursion into the West Bank town of Ramallah early yesterday morning after a Palestinian car bomb killed 17 Israelis.
Officials said they demanded and got assurances from the Israeli government that it did not plan to harm Arafat.
"I don't think exiling Arafat solves anything," White House spokesman Sean McCormack said. "The issue is building Palestinian institutions and, in the process, bringing the Palestinian people into the building of these institutions."
But while repeating that Arafat is the leader of the Palestinian people, administration officials continued to minimize his importance.
"We're not concentrating on him as much as on institutions," a White House official said.
He also said the United States would not insist that Israel negotiate with Arafat: "It's not for us to tell Israel whom to talk to."
"We're basically beyond the Arafat-or-nothing mode," the official said. "There is a new willingness among other Palestinians - officials and non-officials - to talk about the future without everything going through him."
Terrorism threat
But as the United States presses for Palestinian reform as a building block to a peace deal, fear is mounting among Israel's supporters in Washington that the White House intends to move too fast and pressure Israel to make peace while the threat of terrorism continues.
"Some are urging the president to endorse a rigid timeline that would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state," the powerful American-Israel Public Affairs Committee said in a statement, referring to proposals by Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah II.
"Such a timeline, which is not predicated on the Palestinian Authority's renunciation, rejection and elimination of terrorism, would undermine America's war against terrorism by rewarding Palestinian violence."
President Bush, in a speech April 4, endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state that is politically and economically "viable," but the administration has yet to suggest what its boundaries should be.
Yet given the wide gaps between Sharon and the Arab call for a total withdrawal to the 1967 lines, "you've got to offer your own idea of where a rational framework for debate exists," a U.S. official said.
Sharon has offered to negotiate a long-term interim agreement that would let the Palestinians keep the 42 percent of the West Bank they controlled when their uprising began in late September 2000.
Two other administration officials said using the 1967 lines, with modifications, as a starting point for talks was an idea being discussed in the administration. "The idea has been around for a long time," one said.
But another cautioned that it might not emerge in the administration's plan: "I don't know how much support it has," the official said.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said after a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday, "The United States realizes the importance of the 1967 lines."
Other border talks
The idea figured prominently in the final set of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians before the 2001 elections that brought Sharon's government to power, according to notes of a European envoy who acted as an observer.
In those talks, based on a proposal by former President Bill Clinton, the two sides discussed modifying the border to allow settlers to be brought into settlement "blocks" close to the 1967 lines in exchange for other territory that would be given to the Palestinians.
More recently, the idea has been picked up by centrist Labor Party members of Sharon's coalition. Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the current Labor leader, has called for using United Nations resolutions 242 and 338 and the Saudi plan as foundations for a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, and would be prepared to yield all of the Gaza Strip, most of the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem to the Palestinians, according to the May 16 Jerusalem Post.
The U.N. resolutions call for an Israeli withdrawal from territory it occupied during the 1967 war, but said Israel needs to have secure borders.
A poll conducted for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot in late March found that 59 percent of Israelis viewed the settlements as a security liability for Israel.
Another poll, conducted by the Dahaf Institute for the leftist Peace Now organization, found 59 percent of Israelis favoring a peace deal that included withdrawal to the 1967 borders, a compromise on Jerusalem and a Palestinian abandonment of the right of refugees to return to their former homes in Israel.