TEL AVIV // Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, indicated yesterday that he could have reservations in accepting a French proposal to reignite peace talks at a Paris conference planned for as early as this month.
Mr Netanyahu, speaking at his weekly cabinet meeting, suggested he may opt to pursue an American initiative for the restarting of talks, possibly because the US is Israel's staunchest ally and is known for looking out for Israel's interests.
The prime minister's comments came three days after he met the French foreign minister, Alain Juppe, in Jerusalem.
Mr Juppe, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz yesterday, said France would support the Palestinian drive for full United Nations membership and recognition of statehood unless Israel agreed to the French plan. The French plan calls for holding a conference in Paris to discuss ideas on reigniting peace talks, and for the negotiations to include using Israel's pre-1967 lines as the basis for the borders of a Palestinian state.
Mr Juppe, on a visit to Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank this week, offered for France to host talks in Paris this month or in July to have the two sides discuss ideas for breaking the deadlock in the peace process.
Mr Netanyahu told his cabinet, according to a statement released by his office: "We will study the proposal and discuss it with our friend, the United States. The Americans also want to promote initiatives, and we have our own thoughts, too." He did not provide any detail on ideas being weighed by the administration of Barack Obama, the US president, or by his own government.
Mr Netanyahu also said that his government "will see how the [French] proposal fits with other initiatives. Understandably, it's not possible to implement all of them, and it's better to concentrate on one initiative and move it forward." The premier's statements may also have been aimed at his right-wing support base, many of whose members would oppose the French plan because it includes the condition that Israel's pre-1967 borders serve as a starting point for talks on the boundaries of the future Palestinian state.
That condition has been publicly promoted by Mr Obama in a speech in Washington last month that took place while Mr Netanyahu was on a US visit. Mr Netanyahu had reacted angrily, saying the pre-1967 borders would leave Israel unable to defend itself.
During the 1967 Middle East war, Israel occupied territories including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It has since withdrawn from Gaza, although it still controls the enclave's airspace, waters and all but one of its border crossings, and still occupies the West Bank. Palestinians want their future state to include Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as the capital.
Mr Netanyahu, however, has appeared to ignore Mr Obama's statement that talks on future borders would also include territorial swaps, as well as the fact that the pre-1967 boundaries are already widely accepted in the international community as being the basis for Palestinian statehood.
Gideon Saar, the education minister and a member of Mr Netanyahu's Likud party, told other Likud ministers at their weekly meeting yesterday that the French initiative was "problematic". Despite Mr Obama having said that the pre-war frontiers would serve as the starting point for talks, Mr Saar said that the French initiative includes those boundaries "as the end result of the negotiations even before they began".
The French initiative also includes a solution of "two states for two peoples", indicating that it supports the Israeli government's demand for the Palestinian state to recognise Israel as a Jewish state. The Palestinians have been reluctant to accept such a condition because it would undermine their insistence that Palestinians who lost their homes in the 1948 war, which brought about the creation of Israel, should be allowed to return to their former villages within Israel.
Furthermore, the French plan also calls on both Israel and the Palestinians to avoid unilateral moves - for Israel, expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and for the Palestinians, continuing their plan for pursuing international recognition of their statehood from the UN in September.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which holds sway in the West Bank, told the Reuters agency on Saturday that he would accept the French plan "in principle".
France is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and it has not yet said whether or not it would back the Palestinian plan. The US, however, has indicated it may veto such a resolution should it come up for a vote in the Security Council.
US-backed negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians collapsed in September weeks after they began after Israel rejected the Palestinian demand to extend a temporary halt on Jewish settlement construction.
