Amid Progress in Talks, Albright to Meet Mideast Leaders

WASHINGTON — Israeli and Palestinian negotiators claimed modest progress in renewed Middle East peace talks Thursday, enough to persuade Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to schedule separate meetings next week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

“It’s a very good beginning,” Mahmoud Abbas, a senior advisor to Arafat, said after he and Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister David Levy met with Albright to mark the end of a round of talks in Washington that began Monday. “We did not reach an agreement, but we found a good deal of understanding.”

Levy agreed that the negotiators had made “good progress,” although he acknowledged that much work remained.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said Albright will meet in Europe with Netanyahu and Arafat on her way to a Middle East economic meeting that starts Nov. 16 in Qatar. Israeli officials said the Netanyahu meeting will be in London, and Palestinian sources said the Arafat talks will be in Geneva.

Rubin said lower-level Israeli-Palestinian bargaining will resume in the region Sunday, focusing on creation of an airport, seaport and industrial park in the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip and establishment of a safe-passage route through Israel to connect Gaza with Palestinian-ruled areas of the West Bank.

In 1995 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, Israel promised to permit establishment of those facilities, but the two sides have been unable to agree on how to go about it.

It was on those details left over from 1995 that Israelis and Palestinians recorded some progress this week. The two sides remained far apart on the broader political issues.

“On some of the issues, the gaps have clearly been narrowed and progress has been made,” Rubin said. “On others, there is still work to do.”

For instance, he said, the safe-passage talks had produced a “merged text”--a document combining Israeli and Palestinian proposals with areas of disagreements set off in brackets. And in the airport negotiations, which reached the merged-text stage earlier, he said the two sides had managed to resolve some of their differences.

But no one claimed progress on the key “four-point agenda” that Albright outlined in September. That calls for Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation; a “time out” on Jewish settlement activity; further withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank; and the start of the final-status talks on such sensitive issues as establishment of borders and the status of Jerusalem.