NEW YORK — With a tense week ahead for the future of the Middle East, the United States and Europe scrambled Sunday for a strategy that would help avoid a jarring showdown over whether to admit an independent Palestine as a new United Nations member. Instead, they sought to guide Israel and the Palestinians back into the tough bargaining on a long- sought peace agreement.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and European Union foreign-policy chief Catherine Ashton held talks in New York, where the Palestinian plan for statehood and U.N. membership would run into an American veto in the Security Council and possible Israeli recriminations.
Yet there was no apparent and immediate solution to the many problems that have hindered Mideast peace efforts for months. Diplomats were working feverishly as part of an increasingly desperate effort to guide the parties back into direct negotiations but were tight-lipped on whether the slim chances for a breakthrough were improving.
“We are meeting to talk about the way forward,” Clinton said as she shook hands with Ashton in a New York hotel. She declined to say if mediators were making progress.
The Palestinians are frustrated by their inability to win from Israel concessions such as a freeze on settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. And with violence out of the question and bilateral talks with Israel failing, they see the U.N. route as the only viable route for progress in the short term.
To address the Palestinian concerns, Western officials were discussing the possibility of including schedules, however vague, in any statement put out by the Mideast peace mediators — the U.S., EU, U.N. and Russia — known as the Quartet, officials said. These would focus on the restart of Israeli- Palestinian talks and signs of tangible progress.
Envoys from all four entities gathered Sunday in New York, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon met with Quartet envoy Tony Blair. A further meeting of Quartet officials was planned for today, officials said, with Ashton possibly presenting some ideas to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas around the same time.
