US visit boosts Olmert's unilateral plan

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Forget the talk in Washington about giving peacemaking a chance.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's trip to the White House was in reality an important step toward imposing a border unilaterally on the Palestinians.

The shift in U.S. language to describe Prime Minister Olmert's ideas for dividing up the occupied West Bank from "interesting" to "bold" might not look like much, but was more than the Israelis had expected in advance.

The insistence by both Olmert and President George W. Bush that diplomacy with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would have to be tried before unilateral measures was seen in Israel as neither particularly unexpected nor meaningful.

"Nobody takes this seriously, neither Americans nor Israelis," said political analyst Gerald Steinberg.

"It's a charade. They're going to go through the motions of talking to Abbas and certainly Olmert knows that is not going to produce anything."

Unilateral Israeli moves would mean giving up remote settlements on occupied land, but also expanding bigger settler blocs, taking in swathes of territory the Palestinians seek for a state in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"Olmert's plan is the most dangerous plan proposed in 10 years," said Mohammad Dahlan, an Abbas ally.

Olmert is expected to meet Abbas in coming weeks, but any talks would be far from amounting to negotiations for Palestinian statehood.

Progress would depend not only on Abbas, a moderate, but the Hamas Islamist-led Palestinian government, which is formally committed to destroying Israel and has rejected Western calls to renounce violence and accept past peace deals.

A sporadically violent power struggle between Abbas's Fatah and Hamas will do nothing to strengthen prospects for talks no matter who wins out.

DELAY

That could open the way for Israel, probably at some time next year, to declare that it has no Palestinian partner for peace and seek much firmer U.S. moral and financial support to begin go-it-alone steps.

A delay to give talks a chance means that the Americans do not have to rush to back an Israeli project treated with much greater suspicion by European and Arab countries.

It suits Olmert too while he is still getting his feet under the table following his election in March and trying to govern with a coalition that would be far from certain to push through what is now dubbed a "realignment" plan.

Meanwhile, Israel's West Bank barrier, a key component of unilateral separation, is growing steadily longer and will probably be finished next year. Israel says the barrier keeps out bombers, but makes no secret that it could more or less become the border. Palestinians have long called it a land grab.

The next phase of Olmert's plan would be to remove isolated West Bank settlements in a bigger version of the 2005 pullout from Gaza. The Palestinians could hardly object to removing settlers, but might have missed a window for talks by then.

The United States would still be unlikely to recognize any new boundary as a formal border -- as Israel might ideally want -- but approval for the withdrawal plan could effectively seal the line that Israel lays down for decades.

Perhaps even more important than any words of support that Olmert won in Washington was the rapport he appeared to build with the U.S. President.

Easy smiles and body contact showed how comfortably Olmert had taken the place of Bush's old friend Ariel Sharon, whose collapse into a coma nearly five months ago pushed Olmert to center stage.

The Washington visit was unanimously judged a success by Israeli media, no matter how short the substance. The only dispute was over exactly how many rounds of applause Olmert got in his speech to Congress on Wednesday. It was about 40.

"Chemistry has a substantial effect on how decisions are made," wrote Orly Azulai in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily. "Ehud Olmert passed the first impression test with flying colors."