In a dramatic move clearly designed to give new momentum to Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, last night announced a freeze on all new building at Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The announcement, which will infuriate settler leaders and rightwing opposition parties but delight Mr Barak's moderate coalition partners, seems certain to resolve the mini-crisis that has afflicted peace talks in the past few days. The Palestinians had broken off what were meant to be intensive talks with Israel, aimed at reaching a permanent peace treaty by next September, in protest at the scale of settlement expansion.
Mr Yasser Abed Rabbo, head of the Palestinian negotiating team, had accused Mr Barak of fostering even more construction of homes for Jews in the West Bank than had his hardline predecessor, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu. Until the building stopped, said Mr Abed Rabbo, there was no point in continuing the talks.
Mr Barak's pledge last night to approve no further new building at Jewish settlements underlines his determination to meet the September deadline, and an earlier February deadline by which the "framework" of that final peace deal is due to be agreed. "At this stage, while we are in the midst of the negotiations," he said, "it would interfere with government policy to start new building."
The prime minister's unexpected announcement will have been music to the ears of the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, who flew in from Damascus last night anxious to try to bring Israel and Syria back to the negotiating table, and reluctant to embroil herself in another of the periodic Israeli-Palestinian mini-crises. After meeting President Hafez Assad in the Syrian capital, Ms Albright pronounced herself "much more hopeful" about prospects for Israeli-Syrian reconciliation. A leaked diplomatic cable from Israel's Ambassador in Washington, Mr Zalman Shoval, published in Jerusalem yesterday, however, suggests that Ms Albright is making the best of a less than ideal situation.
In the cable, Mr Shoval quotes from a conversation with Mr Dennis Ross, the US State Department's Middle East special envoy, who says he is "not optimistic" about the prospects for a breakthrough, and that Mr Assad is preoccupied "with internal problems and power struggles in the Syrian leadership".
Mr Ross is also quoted as confirming that the Syrian president's health appears to be somewhat unstable. Because of all these factors, the cable reports, the sense of urgency so palpable in Syria immediately after Mr Barak's election victory in May is now dissipating.
Reuters reports:
A fringe group of right-wing Jews burned Palestinian flags yesterday to protest against building work approved by Muslim authorities at the Temple Mount. As the group marched through Jerusalem's Old City, builders at the mosque site sealed one of three entrances to the underground chamber known as Solomon's Stables which Muslims identify as the 7th century Marwani mosque.
"The Arabs are making a terrible abomination and destruction on the Temple Mount," said Mr Gershon Salomon, one of around 40 members of the Temple Mount Faithful group which gathered outside Orient House, the headquarters of the PLO in East Jerusalem.