Israeli, Palestinian negotiators start talks on core issues

Olmert isn't sure an accord will be reached in a year

Palestinian children used a candle for light yesterday during a power outage in Gaza. Israel has cut back on some of its fuel shipments to the Gaza Strip in response to the daily barrages of homemade rockets fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza at Israeli border towns. (Hatem Moussa/Associated Press)

JERUSALEM - Top Israeli and Palestinian negotiators began talks on core issues yesterday, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel sought to lower expectations of reaching a final peace agreement within a year.

"I'm not sure we can reach an agreement, and I'm not sure we can reach its implementation," Olmert told the Parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee yesterday, an official who had attended the meeting said.

But Olmert said he would be "committing a sin to my duty" if he did not try, and called what he described as the right-wing opposition's position of wanting to maintain the status quo "dangerous, adventurous, and irresponsible."

Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, and Ahmed Qurei, the former Palestinian prime minister, met in a hotel for two hours without aides, charged by their leaders with discussing the contentious issues that must be resolved for any final status deal.

The issues, being broached for the first time in seven years, include borders, the fate of the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants, and the status of Jerusalem, the eastern part of which the Palestinians demand as the capital of any state.

President Bush said Thursday in the West Bank that he believed a treaty would be signed by the time he left office in January 2009.

Back in Jerusalem the same day, Bush expressed his views on some of the major issues, including the need for "mutually agreed adjustments to the armistice lines of 1949 to reflect current realities," a reference to populous Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank that Israel intends to keep; and a solution to the refugee issue based on compensation and movement to a new Palestinian state, rather than a return to the refugees' former homes in what is now Israel.

Yesterday, Livni said the negotiations would be "conducted quietly," away from cameras, to prevent the talks from becoming overly political, according to a statement. "Faced with a choice between headlines and daily drama as opposed to results, I choose results," Livni said.

"We need to make 2008 the year of peace and a treaty," Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, said in an interview. "I really believe it's doable."

The sides "are not beginning from scratch," he said. "We have had many negotiations in the past, and we don't need to reinvent the wheel."

Olmert's remarks yesterday might have been intended partly for internal consumption, with two of his more hawkish coalition partners, the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party and the religious Shas Party, having threatened to leave the government if the talks become serious.

Olmert has tried to assuage the ministers who lead those parties, inviting them to a dinner with Bush on Thursday.

But Avigdor Lieberman, who leads Yisrael Beiteinu, was further angered by Olmert, who said in an internal meeting Sunday that Israel's failure to remove illegal outposts in the West Bank was "a disgrace," said an Israeli official who was at the meeting and did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak.