Pittsburgh Post-Gazette · Pittsburgh, PA · 8 October 2010

CP-2010-040

Arab League holds key to peace talks

U.S. hopes Arabs will encourage Palestinians

By Mark Landler and Ethan Bronner / The New York Times

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Transcribed from the clipping

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration believes it has persuaded Arab states not to scuttle the fledgling Middle East peace negotiations, officials said Thursday, despite the Israeli government’s refusal to freeze Jewish settlements and a vow by the Palestinians to walk away if Israel did not.

With the Arab League’s meeting Friday expected to deliver a pivotal decision on the future of the talks, the United States has appealed to Jordan and other Arab nations to stop short of pushing the Palestinians to break off the negotiations. After days of intensive diplomacy by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the administration’s special envoy, George J.

Mitchell, the administration now expects the meeting in Libya to produce a stream of vitriol against Israel and an insistence that the two sides cannot talk while settlement building is under way, but no formal declaration that negotiations should be abandoned, U.S. and Israeli officials said.

Such an outcome would allow the peace process to survive another tricky deadline but leave the negotiations basically where they have been since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sat down in Washington last month: stuck in the starting gate, with no further meeting scheduled until the settlements issue is resolved.

Palestinian officials have not commented on the prospective Arab League decision, and Thursday they were holding fast to their position that talks could not continue if settlement building did. But the Arab League’s calibrated response would at least allow the lines to remain open. The United States continues to haggle with Mr.

Netanyahu over a package of security guarantees in return for a one-time 60-day extension of the freeze, Israeli and U.S. officials said. But there are no ministerial meetings planned to consider extending the freeze, and it cannot be extended without ministerial approval. The United States signed an agreement Thursday to sell 20 F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft to Israel.

Officials said the deal was long in the making and not related to the effort to get the Israelis to extend the freeze, although the United States might throw in an extra plane as a sweetener for Mr. Netanyahu, they said. In Israel, there was every indication that the Arab League meeting would pass without any settlements announcement from the prime minister.

The head of the settler movement said Thursday that his group, Yesha Council, no longer saw the need to run advertisements pressing the government not to renew the construction freeze. “We have pulled back our campaign and don’t feel that the coming days will be dramatic,” the group’s executive director, Naftali Bennett, said in an interview.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping, and nothing on it contradicts the label. Adjudicated against the printed page: Nothing on this page identifies the newspaper. The only standing type is the centred section flag "INTERNATIONAL" at the top; there is no masthead, no folio, no running head and no page number, and the bottom margin carries nothing but the last line of body ty DO NOT APPLY THE SLIDE-24 SWAP MECHANICALLY — it is not proven, and this is the one pair in my twelve where I think Ingrid has gone a step past the page. The date as staged is well supported by the text: the United States "signed an agreement Thursday to sell 20 F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft to Israel" and "the Ar

Context added by this archive

New York Times wire copy carried by a U.S. metro. Nouns: 'Jewish settlements', 'settlements', 'settlement building', 'the settler movement', 'construction freeze'. The word 'occupied' does not appear. 'Judea and Samaria' does not appear.

Bennett is identified by function (executive director of the Yesha Council / head of the settler movement) with no description of what the Yesha Council is beyond that. The section flag 'INTERNATIONAL' is a standing head, not a dek; the dek recorded above is the printed subhead under the headline.

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