Israeli Cabinet fails to agree on plan to present to Albright

JERUSALEM, Dec. 17 (JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be arriving essentially empty-handed when he meets with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Thursday. Netanyahu delayed his departure for Paris until Wednesday night in an unsuccessful bid to finalize Israel’s positions on a further redeployment in the West Bank. Hard-line ministers in his Cabinet blocked efforts by the more moderate Foreign Minister David Levy to let Netanyahu discuss specific proposals for the pullback with Albright. The proposals were to be based on a new map detailing Israel’s vision of how its borders should look in a final-status agreement with the Palestinians. But in several acrimonious Cabinet sessions this week, the ministers were unable to agree on what the new map should look like. After a three-hour Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Netanyahu and National Infrastructure Minister Ariel Sharon issued a joint statement saying that the prime minister would discuss with Albright only Israel’s general interests in the permanent accord. They said he would outline them on an existing map based on the 1995 Interim Agreement, which sets forth the current West Bank status. “It was our hope that the prime minister could present a map of Israel’s security areas to the U.S. Secretary of State,” David Bar-Illan, the prime minister’s director of communications, told Israel Radio. But the ministers were “unable to reach a compromise” between maps presented by Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai and a more hawkish vision presented by Sharon, Bar-Illan said. The Clinton administration has been demanding that Israel come up with a “credible” proposal for withdrawal. But with hard-line coalition members threatening to bring down the government if Netanyahu started discussing the specifics of a redeployment with Albright, the prime minister was ultimately compelled to scale down the agenda. The joint statement said the prime minister would stress that any redeployment would depend on Palestinian fulfillment of obligations under the peace accords. Levy, who had earlier warned that Netanyahu could not go empty-handed to the meeting with Albright, canceled plans to accompany the prime minister on the trip.