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Powell hears shadow plan for peace in Middle East ( 2003-12-06 14:49) (nytimes.com)
Rebuffing appeals from Israel, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met Friday with two self-appointed peace negotiators who are promoting a shadow agreement on a Palestinian state, and afterward both the State Department and Mr. Powell's guests maintained that their goals were the same. The meeting at the State Department between Mr. Powell and the negotiators, Yossi Beilin of Israel and Yasir Abed Rabbo, who led the Palestinian delegation, was closed to reporters and was discussed later by administration spokesmen with extreme delicacy, mainly because of Israel's hostility to the plan. "I thought it was a very good meeting," Mr. Powell told reporters in front of the State Department after a separate session with King Abdullah II of Jordan. He added that he used the session with the negotiators to emphasize the administration's own stalled peace plan toward Palestinian statehood, known as the road map. "I had a chance to describe to them the primacy of the road map as the document that the sides agree upon at this moment," Mr. Powell said. "It is still there, and I think that still is the basis to go forward." Mr. Rabbo and Mr. Beilin also praised the meeting before leaving for the United Nations, where they presented their plan to officials there. "We were encouraged," said Mr. Rabbo. "The solution here satisfies the basic aspiration of the people on both sides." For Mr. Powell and others in the administration, it was a day highlighting a certain frustration over the Middle East situation, mixed with a few embers of hope that peace talks might be revived in coming days and weeks after months when little has happened. The basic critique in the administration of the proposal, unveiled in Geneva on Monday and now known as the Geneva plan, is that it ignores the requirements, outlined in the road map, that the Palestinian side has to crack down immediately on terrorist groups and the Israeli side has to ease conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank. The plan worked out by Mr. Beilin, a former justice minister in Israel, and Mr. Rabbo, a former Palestinian information minister, calls for a final settlement on a Palestinian state but does not address the first steps that have bedeviled negotiators in the administration. Despite criticism of the Beilin-Rabbo plan by some conservative Christian and Jewish groups, administration officials say that hard-liners among Mr. Bush's aides supported the idea of Mr. Powell meeting with Mr. Beilin and Mr. Rabbo. Elliott Abrams, director of Middle East affairs at the White House, attended the meeting. Mr. Abrams was an outspoken critic of the Clinton administration's approach on the Middle East, from which the Beilin-Rabbo plan borrows heavily. He was said to have supported the idea of the meeting. An administration official said that in political terms, it was tactically wise to meet with the plan's authors, proclaim solidarity with their general goal and maintain that the administration had the only plan for getting there. Denouncing Mr. Beilin and Mr. Rabbo, others in the administration said, would only strengthen their hand, highlight the Middle East stalemate and reinforce the critics' image of Mr. Bush as beholden to Israel and its conservative American supporters. The Geneva plan projects a Palestinian state occupying nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza, but with Jewish settlements along the West Bank's borders and most of Jerusalem given to Israel. In return, the Palestinians would get sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem and the holy sites at the Temple Mount. This vision of a state was built on maps circulating in the final days of the Clinton administration. That fact alone rankles members of the Bush administration who viewed President Clinton's efforts as misguided. But some Middle East experts in the Bush administration say privately that a future Palestinian state may well look like the one worked out by Mr. Beilin and Mr. Rabbo and their teams, though it will take years of pursuing a step-by-step approach to build confidence on both sides and reach that goal. "Their plan deals with final-status issues," said an administration official, using a phrase connoting the fact that boundaries and attributes of a Palestinian state are to be negotiated only after initial steps are taken to stop terrorism and curb Israeli settlements in the West Bank. "The final-status issues are reserved for the third phase of the road map," this official added. "When we get to the third phase, we'll talk about the kinds of things that the Geneva plan talks about. But the fact that people are talking about these things now is a useful thing." Administration officials say that Mr. Sharon and his aides are making comments that suggest the possibility of new conciliatory steps toward the Palestinians. And the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, is in negotiations with Palestinian groups to get a new cease-fire in return for actions by Israel. An administration official said that Israel had begun suggesting it might be prepared to "freeze" expansion of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. But he said it was not clear whether Israel's definition of that word was the same as the American definition. "We continue to talk to both sides, including at very high levels," said an administration official. "We are encouraging each to do the things that each side can do. So far, we're hearing a lot of talk."
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