Struggling to stem protests from the Arab world, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday reiterated that the Obama administration still wanted Israel to freeze construction of Jewish settlements, even if it regarded Israel’s compromise offer as “unprecedented.”
Arab officials expressed alarm that the United States seemed to be easing pressure on Israel after Mrs. Clinton said in Jerusalem on Saturday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal of restrained settlement building was better than anything previous Israeli governments had offered.
Mrs. Clinton said the administration would not stop pushing Mr. Netanyahu to do more. But she said that in trying to revive a stalled peace process, she wanted to offer Israel encouragement for moving in the right direction, even if that movement fell short of what the United States wanted.
“I will offer positive reinforcement to the parties when I believe they are taking steps that support the objective of reaching a two-state solution,” she said here, on the eve of a conference of Arab and Western countries. “I will also push them as I have in public and private to do even more.”
Mrs. Clinton’s statement was intended to clarify her remarks in Jerusalem, which had left some of her aides nonplused because she had not voiced the administration’s official position that settlements are illegitimate.
Though not a core subject in peace negotiations, Jewish settlements are a charged issue for Israelis and Palestinians because they involve building in areas that both claim as their ancestral lands.
The administration’s handling of settlements has become a new source of tension in the Middle East. The Palestinians are refusing to negotiate with Israel in the absence of a complete freeze, while other Arab leaders are seizing on what they view as a retreat by the United States.
Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, urged the administration not to accept what he called a “slap in the face” by Israel. He said he hoped the Americans would “try hard and in a firmer way.” Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said the United States had to provide “guarantees about issues of settlements.”
The inability to win a freeze would undermine the prospects for peace talks, Mr. Moussa told reporters. “I’m really afraid that we’re about to see a failure,” he said.
On Saturday, Mrs. Clinton met in the emirate of Abu Dhabi with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who rejected an Israeli proposal to put a moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank, but to allow the completion of about 3,000 additional units and to exclude East Jerusalem from any restrictions.
The Palestinian foreign minister, Riad Malki, said accepting such an offer would undermine the Palestinian Authority when Mr. Abbas had already hurt his standing among Arabs by agreeing to defer consideration of a United Nations report detailing evidence of possible war crimes by both the Israelis and Palestinian militants in Gaza last winter. Mr. Abbas eventually reversed himself, pushing to have the report sent to the Security Council.
Mr. Malki said in an interview that he was surprised by Mrs. Clinton’s comments in Jerusalem. “It was, from our point of view, inconsistent with what we had heard back in Abu Dhabi.”
At her first public appearance in Marrakesh on Monday, Mrs. Clinton read a statement saying that the American position had not changed. “As the president has said on many occasions,” she declared, “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”
A State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, declined to characterize her earlier remarks as a misstep, but said, “We obviously were very conscious of the reaction in the region to her appearance in Jerusalem.”
While the Obama administration has not changed its policy, its public statements on settlements have evolved considerably. In May, Mrs. Clinton said President Obama wanted to see “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions.”
But at the United Nations in September, Mr. Obama used the word “restrain” in referring to construction, suggesting the administration realized it was unlikely to get a total freeze.
Some Middle East analysts said the Obama administration may have concluded that there was no value in continuing to press Israel about settlements, when the prospects for peace negotiations seemed remote.
“They’re dialing things back a notch until they can think through how and what to do for the next phase,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Some administration officials have said they are rethinking a strategy that has produced neither a settlement freeze nor gestures toward Israel by its Arab neighbors, which Mr. Obama has also sought.
Mrs. Clinton unexpectedly put off her return to Washington for a day so she could fly to Cairo on Tuesday to meet the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. American officials said she wanted to meet face to face with a “critical player” to discuss developments in the region.
On Monday, Mrs. Clinton met with foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. Afterward, she said some ministers seemed unaware of the extent of the Israeli proposal on settlements, which she said “holds the promise of moving a step closer to a two-state solution.”
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