Mideast Peace talks bring optimism to Israeli and Palestinian leaders

Abbas and Olmert expressing hopes for future peace

By AMY TEIBEL and MOHAMMED DARAGHMEH, Associated Press Writers


WASHINGTON - Hours before the opening of a high-stakes international conference on the Middle East, President Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas expressed hope that peace finally could be achieved. A senior member of the Palestinian delegation said Monday an elusive joint statement on the contours for future talks was within reach.

The three leaders offered hopeful words, but in brief statements also hinted at the serious divisions that exist over the best path to peace. Olmert and Abbas met separately with Bush at the White House.

"I'm looking forward to continuing our serious dialogue with you and the president of the Palestinian Authority to see whether or not peace is possible. I'm optimistic," Bush said at Olmert's side. Later, after a similar meeting with Abbas, Bush said, "We want to help you. We want there to be peace. We want the people in the Palestinian territories to have hope."

Olmert said that international support — from Bush and also, presumably, from the Arab nations that will attend the conference — "is very important to us" and could make all the difference.

"This time, it's different because we are going to have a lot of participation in what I hope will launch a serious process of negotiations between us and the Palestinians," Olmert said, referring to the talks expected to begin in earnest after this week's U.S.-hosted meetings.

For his part, Abbas stressed when he appeared with Bush the need for talks to address key issues of Palestinian statehood, sticky discussions that have doomed previous peace efforts — and for the president to be personally engaged.

"We have a great deal of hope that this conference will produce permanent status negotiations, expanded negotiations, over all permanent status issues that would lead to a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian people," he said. "This is a great initiative and we need his (Bush's) continuing effort to achieve this objective."

After months of trying to forge a joint outline, Israel and the Palestinians have made an 11th-hour push in recent days to come up with a statement for presentation at Tuesday's gathering in Annapolis, Md. It is to be the first time that Israel, a large group of Arab states and international envoys from around the world will sit down together to try to relaunch a peace process. Later Monday, the conference gets under way with a dinner at the State Department.

"We will reach a joint paper today or tomorrow," Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior aide to Abbas, told The Associated Press. "There is a persistent American effort to have this statement."

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters at midday Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to meet with representatives of both sides at the department later Monday to discuss the statement.

Talks on the joint statement had faltered over a Palestinian desire that it address, at least in general terms, so-called final status issues — final borders, sovereignty over disputed Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees who lost homes in Israel following its 1948 creation.

Israel has pressed for a broader, vaguer statement of commitment to two states living side-by-side in peace. It has promised to negotiate the contentious issues, however, in the formal negotiations that are to follow the conference.

Bush will open the Annapolis conference by making clear in a speech that Mideast peace is a top priority for the rest of his time in office through January 2009, but he is expected to conclude that the time is not right for him to advance his own ideas on how to achieve that, said national security adviser Stephen Hadley.

"The Israelis and Palestinians have waited a long time for this vision to be realized, and I call upon all those gathering in Annapolis this week to redouble their efforts to turn dreams of peace into reality," Bush said in a statement Sunday night.

The run-up to the meeting has been fraught with disputes, skepticism and suspicion about the opposing parties' good faith. And expectations remain low.

Clinching a joint statement of objectives from Abbas and Olmert, indeed, is seen as a tall order because of the charged issues that divide the two sides. Rice wasn't able to bridge the gaps, even after eight missions to the region this year.

Still, whatever joint agreement the Israelis and Palestinians present at Annapolis will be a starting point and is likely to sketch only vague bargaining terms with the big statehood to come later.

Saeb Erekat, a principal Palestinian negotiator, told The Associated Press on Monday that his side wants, among other things, language providing for the monitoring of two states living side by side in peace and also some specification that a peace treaty should be accomplished before the end of 2008.

The conference, which is taking place in Washington and Annapolis, Maryland, is meant to draw outside backing for the difficult talks that will follow. The Arab League endorsement of the gathering, while reluctant, was considered crucial because Abbas needs to be shored up, especially after Islamic Hamas militants routed his loyalists in the Gaza Strip in June and now rule there.

In his speech before the gathering on Tuesday, Olmert will reassert his position that implementation of any peace deal would require a halt to attacks on Israel from Gaza, Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said.

Hamas is the main wild card in renewed peace efforts. Israel and the Palestinians hope that progress on peacemaking will weaken the Islamic group and give Abbas the ability to extend his influence to include that territory, too. But there is no guarantee that logic will prevail and that Hamas will be removed.

Olmert has not explicitly called for the Islamic group's ouster.

In the West Bank town of Ramallah, Abbas' seat of government, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki called on Israel to commit at the conference to a complete freeze on settlement construction.

Olmert made clear Sunday that Annapolis is but a start."

Syria, which has been in a state of war with Israel for six decades, agreed Sunday to attend the session, giving Bush full backing from all 16 Arab states who were invited, plus the Arab League. It hopes to use forum to press for the return of the Golan Heights, strategic territory Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war.

Saudi Arabia's minister of transportation and minister of information and culture, Jbarah Al-Seresri, said Monday that the cabinet headed by King Abdullah has "expressed the kingdom's hope that the conference will deal with the essential issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict, aiming to approach fair and general peace in all aspects within a timetable, according to President George W. Bush's perspective, to establish a Palestinian state relying on international legitimacy, the road map and the Arab initiative."

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Associated Press Writers Jennifer Loven at the White House and Muhammed Daraghmeh, in Annapolis, Md., contributed to this story.