By Ethan Bronner
The New York Times
JERUSALEM -- With revolutionary fervor sweeping the Middle East, Israel is under mounting pressure to make a far-reaching offer to the Palestinians or face a U.N. vote welcoming the state of Palestine as a member whose territory includes all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Authority has been steadily building support for such a resolution in September, a move that could put Israel in a diplomatic vise. Israel would be occupying land belonging to a fellow U.N. member, land it has controlled and settled for more than four decades and some of which it expects to keep in any two-state solution.
"We are facing a diplomatic-political tsunami that the majority of the public is unaware of and that will peak in September," said Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, at a conference in Tel Aviv last month. "It is a very dangerous situation, one that requires action." He added, "Paralysis, rhetoric, inaction will deepen the isolation of Israel."
With aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thrashing out proposals to the Palestinians, President Shimon Peres is due at the White House on Tuesday to meet with President Barack Obama and explore ways out of the bind. The United States is still uncertain how to move the process forward, according to diplomats here.
Israel's offer is expected to include transfer of some West Bank territory outside its settlements to Palestinian control and may suggest a regional component -- an international conference to serve as a response to the Arab League peace initiatives.
But Palestinian leaders, emboldened by support for their statehood bid, dismiss the expected offer as insufficient and continue to demand an end to settlement building before talks can begin.
"We want to generate pressure on Israel to make it feel isolated and help it understand that there can be no talks without a stop to settlements," said Nabil Shaath, who leads the foreign affairs department of Fatah, the main party of the Palestinian Authority. "Without that, our goal is membership in the United Nations General Assembly in September."
Israeli, Palestinian and Western officials interviewed on the current impasse, most of them requesting anonymity, expressed an unusual degree of pessimism about a peaceful resolution. All agreed that the turmoil across the Middle East had prompted opposing responses from Israel and much of the world.
Israel, seeing the prospect of even more hostile governments as its neighbors, is insisting on caution before taking any significant steps. It also wants to build in extensive long-term security guarantees in any two-state solution, but those inevitably infringe on the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.
The international community tends to draw the opposite conclusion. Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain said last week that one of the most important lessons to be learned from the Arab Spring was that "legitimate aspirations cannot be ignored." In the Haaretz newspaper on Thursday, Ari Shavit compared 2011 and the biggest military setback Israel ever faced, in 1973.
