US proposal would let most colonists stay in West Bank, envoy says

Washington: Roughly three-quarters of Jewish colonists in the West Bank would be included in redrawn Israeli borders envisioned under US-backed peace negotiations, the lead US envoy told American Jewish leaders on Thursday.

The colony estimate was among details of a closely held plan to frame a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians this year, a participant in the conversation between Jewish leaders and US envoy Martin Indyk said.

The participant and another person familiar with the conversation spoke on the condition of anonymity because neither the Israeli nor Palestinian leaders have yet agreed to the US proposals for final talks.

Indyk also told the group that a final peace treaty could provide for compensation to Jews forced out of Arab countries after the founding of Israel in 1948. That would give descendants of those refugees living in Israel a potential financial stake in a deal long assumed to also provide compensation for Arabs who left land in what is now Israel.

Indyk’s willingness to provide such details to strong US advocates for Israel appears to be part of an effort to rally external support for the effort led by Secretary of State John Kerry.

The goal is what Kerry calls a framework for a peace treaty. Indyk told the group he hopes to win agreement from both sides within a few weeks.

Peace talks would then continue under the terms laid out in the framework through the rest of this year. Kerry had originally set an April deadline for a deal.

The framework will be made public if both sides agree to it, Indyk told the group. Both sides could register “reservations” about some terms, meaning that while they agree to the overall architecture for talks on sensitive issues such as the future of occupied Jerusalem, they are not necessarily agreeing now to a particular outcome of the talks.

“During an off-the-record briefing with Jewish leaders, Ambassador Indyk described the well-known United States position” that a future Palestine should be based on Mideast lines as they existed before the 1967 wars, plus mutually agreed swaps, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

“Given this is an ongoing process and these decisions have not yet been made, at no point did Ambassador Indyk make a prediction of the final contents of a framework.”