Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel issued his strongest and most vocal support yet on Sunday for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s efforts to forge a Middle East peace plan, raising the possibility of making peace with the Palestinians before the conclusion of the Bush administration.
“If we and the Palestinians act with determination, there is a chance that we can achieve real accomplishments — perhaps even before the end of President Bush’s term in office,” Mr. Olmert told a gathering of dignitaries at a dinner here sponsored by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
With Ms. Rice and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, sitting in front of him, nodding approvingly, Mr. Olmert firmly threw his weight behind Ms. Rice’s plans to use an upcoming Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Md., this fall to begin a push toward resolving the final status issues that have bedeviled peace negotiators since 1979.
“Annapolis will be the jumping-off point for continued serious and in-depth negotiations, which will not avoid any issue or ignore any division that has clouded our relations with the Palestinian people for many years,” Mr. Olmert said. He noted that he was speaking on the 12th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“This is Rabin’s legacy,” Mr. Olmert said. “This is a legacy to which I am obligated; this is a legacy according to which I intend to lead the state of Israel over the coming months — before the meeting in Annapolis, during it and most important after it.”
His strong words offered a boost to Ms. Rice, who is working hard to make progress in peace talks before the end of President Bush’s term. Israeli and Arab officials say that she still has an uphill battle ahead of her.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators still have not reached agreement on what the peace conference will tackle and how it will handle the four final status issues: the status of Jerusalem, the contours of a Palestinian state, the removal of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and the fate of refugees who left, or were forced to leave, their homes in Israel, mostly before or during the 1948 war.
The Palestinians want a joint statement that includes a timetable for negotiations; Israeli officials, thus far, have balked, saying they want their security concerns met first.
But some foreign policy experts said that with his strong statement on Sunday, Mr. Olmert had burned his bridges with the conservative hawks within the Israeli political establishment who have cautioned against Ms. Rice’s push toward peace negotiations.
A senior Israeli official said there remained deep concern in Israel that Ms. Rice was pushing Israelis too hard and too fast, risking a collapse of the talks before they really got going.
Ms. Rice, during a round table with reporters before Mr. Olmert’s speech, took issue with skeptics who say that she has not done an adequate job of preparing the way for the peace talks. She said that while she acknowledged that her predecessors all tried to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians, “It hasn’t worked.”
“So, with all due respect,” she said, in a rare detour into personal reflection, “I’ll do it my way.”
Ms. Rice is heading to the West Bank on Monday for talks with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. No date has been set yet for the peace conference. But Ms. Rice said she expected that once she did get around to issuing invitations, most invitees — and she has said she plans to invite Saudi Arabia, which does not have diplomatic relations with Israel — would attend.
Administration officials said, though, that Hamas, the militant Islamist movement that seized control of the Gaza Strip over the summer, was not likely to be invited. Hamas has rejected the Annapolis conference as pointless.
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