October 11, 2002	Friday	Sha'aban 4, 1423

WASHINGTON, Oct 10: The United States is cool to a British proposal that Israelis and Palestinians start talks before the end of this year on a permanent settlement, a State Department official said on Wednesday.

The proposal, made by Prime Minister Tony Blair on Oct 1, goes way beyond the timetable envisaged by the “quartet” of mediators, which indirectly includes Britain through the European Union, said the official, who asked not to be named.

“It rushes the strategy that the quartet agreed to at the United Nations last month, and the European Union is part of that quartet,” he said.

The quartet, which also includes the United States, Russia and the United Nations, last met in New York on Sept. 17 on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session.

It outlined a peace plan that will postpone talks on the future of the Palestinian territories until at least 2004.

“It (Blair’s proposal) goes directly against the statement of the quartet that not ‘til 2004 to 2005 would there be Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on final status issues,” the State Department official said.

Blair made the proposal at the annual conference of his Labour Party in Blackpool after party leftists criticized him for threatening war against Iraq instead of trying to end Israeli-Palestinian violence.

“By this year’s end, we must have revived final status negotiations and they must have explicitly as their aims an Israeli state free from terror, recognized by the Arab world, and a viable Palestinian state based on the boundaries of 1967,” the prime minister said.

The strongest domestic pressures on the Bush administration are mostly in the other direction — against speeding up mediation between Israelis and Palestinians, at least until the Palestinians shunt aside President Yasser Arafat.

President George W. Bush, in his last substantial presentation of Middle East policy in June, said the United States could not help bring about an independent Palestinian state until the Palestinians find “new leadership.”

The State Department official said he was not aware of any deep discussions between London and Washington on Blair’s proposal. Another US official said the proposal appeared to be designed for a particular domestic audience.

HOMES DEMOLISHED: Israeli bulldozers razed eight houses Thursday in the southern West Bank city of Al Khalil on the grounds that the owners did not have a construction permit, an AFP correspondent reported.

Four of them were in the Al-Shaabeh neighourhood, near the Jewish settlement of Qiryat Arba. The other four were empty and were located in Al Khalil’s Qilqis neighborhood, near the Beit Haggai settlement.

Al Khalil was later put under curfew by the Israeli army for no apparent reason. The city is home to some 600 heavily-guarded hardline Jewish settlers and some 120,000 Palestinians. It is the scene of frequent clashes.—AFP