By MATTI FRIEDMAN
JERUSALEM – Israel's defense minister said Sunday he hopes to reach a "wider understanding" on regional peace when he meets Washington's Mideast envoy this week, but gave no indication the sides have resolved a dispute over settlement construction in the West Bank.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Israel's point man on settlements, is heading to London on Monday in hopes of breaking the impasse marring Israel's relations with its most important ally. It will be Barak's second meeting with U.S. envoy George Mitchell in less than a week.
Barak said the goal of his meeting will be "to work toward a wider understanding between us and the U.S. ... and translate it into a shared path acceptable to us, to the U.S. and to the other sides, to make progress on the diplomatic process with the Palestinians, and to opening a door to further moves."
Barak, however, made no mention of the dispute over settlement construction, the issue that is expected to dominate Monday's discussions.
The Obama administration says Israel must halt all construction on lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war and claimed by the Palestinians for a future independent state. Israel wants to keep building in existing settlements to accommodate what it calls "natural growth" in the settler population.
Nearly 300,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank, among some 2.5 million Palestinians, in addition to 180,00 Israelis living in Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem. The Palestinians want their state to include the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with east Jerusalem as their capital. Israel captured all three areas in the 1967 war, though it withdrew all troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005.
Last month, in a move at least partly aimed at easing tensions with Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed support for the first time for the creation of a Palestinian state in a policy speech. He said the Palestinian state would have to be demilitarized and recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people.
On Sunday, Netanyahu said at the weekly meeting of his Cabinet summing up his government's first 100 days, that he had created a "national consensus around the term 'two states for two peoples.'"
The Palestinians have rejected Netanyahu's conditions. They say recognizing Israel as a Jewish state would compromise Israel's one-fifth Arab minority and undermine the claims of Palestinian refugees who lost their homes when Israel was created in 1948.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the fate of Palestinian refugees and millions of their descendants should be the subject of negotiations. "When the Israelis say that the refugee issue is nonnegotiable it means they don't want to discuss the final status issues," he said.
He also called for a full settlement freeze. "We see the continuous settlement expansion as illegal and it must be stopped," he said.
Also Sunday, Israel announced an indictment against a Gaza militant arrested on June 1 after infiltrating from the blockaded Palestinian territory into southern Israel via Egypt.
The man "admitted to having undergone extensive military training in the Gaza Strip ... in order to establish a terrorism infrastructure inside Israel," the Prime Minister's office said.
The statement identified the man as a member of the Popular Resistance Committees, a Gaza militant group. The group's spokesman, Abu Mujahid, said he was looking into the Israeli claim.
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