Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will approve the construction of hundreds of new housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank in the coming days as a prelude to a building freeze of six to nine months aimed at restarting peace talks with the Palestinians, senior Israeli officials said on Friday.
The plan is an attempt to ease pressure on Mr. Netanyahu from within his own Likud Party, which wants settlements to continue unimpeded, and from Washington, the Palestinian Authority and the rest of the Arab world, which want a total halt to such construction.
The new units will be in addition to 2,500 units under construction. All will be in the West Bank. The officials said Jerusalem would remain unaffected by the expected construction moratorium. In exchange for the agreement to stop building in the West Bank, Israel expects gestures from several Arab states, including the reopening of Israeli offices and flyover rights for Israeli planes on their way to Asia.
While the new units and exemption to Jerusalem could prove deeply problematic for the Obama administration and the Palestinian Authority, American officials seem to believe they are on the verge of an announcement in the next few weeks of a renewed Middle East peace process. The target is late September at the gathering of the United Nations General Assembly, which Mr. Netanyahu, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and President Obama will all attend.
A leading Israeli political journalist, Nahum Barnea, wrote in his Friday column in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that a senior American official telephoned him this week to lay out what Mr. Netanyahu would receive in exchange for the freeze: “an improved personal relationship with President Obama; he will get gestures from the moderate Arab states that the Israelis can appreciate, including a reopening of the interests offices in a number of states, tourism and trade relations, flight rights.”
Mr. Barnea attributed the phone call, which he said came from a very top official, to a new policy in Washington of reaching out to the Israeli public after months in which opinion surveys here have shown that Israelis are highly suspicious of Mr. Obama’s policy to the Middle East.
Mr. Abbas repeated this week that he would not meet with Mr. Netanyahu until the settlements were frozen but he also said at a news conference in Paris that the freeze might be accomplished by the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. His top peace negotiator, Saeb Erekat, condemned the plan for new housing starts, saying the only thing it would freeze was the peace process.
Two Israeli officials returned Friday from meetings with the Obama administration’s envoy to the conflict, George J. Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell is expected in Jerusalem late next week in hopes of wrapping up the negotiations over the renewal of the peace process. A renewal is being defined as direct talks with the Palestinians and supportive gestures from the Arab world, in exchange for the freeze and continued on-the-ground improvement in the West Bank by the Israeli occupation authorities.
Mr. Abbas, who besides being the Palestinian president, is head of the Fatah movement, the rival to Hamas, which rules in Gaza. He has increased his popularity among Palestinians as West Bank conditions improve and Gaza stagnates under an Israeli-led siege, according to two new opinion polls. That may encourage Mr. Abbas to go ahead with talks.
The Palestinian Center for Survey and Policy Research, which conducts quarterly surveys, found that support for Mr. Abbas and Fatah over Hamas and its leader, Ismail Haniya, continues to grow both in the West Bank and Gaza. A five percentage point advantage three months ago has nearly tripled to 14 percentage points, it reported, based on a mid-August survey. It also found a big increase in a sense of personal safety in the West Bank, something Mr. Abbas’s security forces have been trying to create, as well as a belief among many of those surveyed that American involvement in peace talks will bring results.
A separate survey, carried out in July and August by Stanley Greenberg, an American who has long polled for Democrats, also found enthusiasm for the Obama administration’s role, and found that Fatah would beat Hamas by 10 points if elections were held today in both the West Bank and Gaza.
The Greenberg survey was carried out for The Israel Project, which seeks to improve Israel’s image and has started to focus efforts in the Palestinian areas as well as in Egypt and Jordan.
Both the Palestinian Center and Greenberg polls found substantial support among Palestinians for a two-state solution, where the two are described as Palestinian and Jewish states. The Palestinian survey found the public evenly divided — 49 percent to 49 percent — over a final accord of mutual recognition and end to conflict. The Greenberg poll found greater enthusiasm in the West Bank — 69 percent to 29 percent — than in Gaza, where 33 percent favored such a two-state solution compared with 56 percent opposed.
The Greenberg polls found that The Israel Project had its work cut out for it in building Israel’s image in the Arab world. Asked separate questions about their attitude toward Israel and Jews, Palestinians and Jordanians had a universally and completely negative response to both. Egyptians were only somewhat less hostile.
On the other hand, a plurality of Egyptians — 46 to 36 percent — approve of their country’s diplomatic relations with Israel. In Jordan, it went the other way — 51 percent opposing those relations and 42 percent approving.
Moreover, the survey found, most Jordanians and Palestinians and a plurality of Egyptians believe that Iran’s nuclear program is aimed not at creating energy, as Iran publicly asserts, but at building nuclear weapons — and they consider that a good thing. At the same time, Egyptians and Jordanians said Iranian nuclear weapons could be a threat to them, but Palestinians did not.
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