JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday he will deliver a major policy address next week laying out his proposed road to Mideast peace, after coming under stiff U.S. pressure to freeze West Bank settlement construction and endorse Palestinian statehood.
Netanyahu offered no hint of what he might say. So far, he has resisted the U.S. demands, deepening an unusually public faceoff with Israel's most important ally. If Netanyahu gives in, however, he could find himself facing a rebellion inside his coalition government, which is dominated by hardliners.
"It must be understood, we seek peace with the Palestinians and with the states of the Arab world while trying to reach as much understanding as possible with the United States and our friends abroad," the Israeli leader said at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting.
"My desire is to achieve a stable peace that rests on solid foundations of security for the state of Israel and its citizens," he added. "Next week I will make an important policy speech in which I will present to the citizens of Israel our principles on achieving this peace and security."
Netanyahu has publicly declared his commitment to peace before, but offered few details about how he hopes to achieve an agreement with the Palestinians without ceding control of most of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
The Palestinians want those lands and the Gaza Strip for their future state, and say they won't renew peace talks until Israel agrees to freeze settlement construction and negotiate Palestinian statehood.
Israeli construction in the West Bank has long tormented peacemaking because it is seen by the international community as a way of cementing control over areas claimed by the Palestinians.
Since entering office in January, Obama has taken up the issue head on. His administration hopes that halting settlement expansion would embolden the Arab world to make overtures toward Israel and improve U.S. relations with the Muslim world, which suffered under his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Obama's demands of Israel do not represent a break with U.S. policy. But his repeated pronouncements of them in high-profile appearances has generated consternation in Israel, which had enjoyed almost unwavering support from Washington during Bush's eight-year tenure.
In speeches last week in Egypt and Europe, Obama prominently pressed for a settlement freeze and a two-state solution. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, backed the call for a settlement freeze at a meeting with Obama on Saturday.
Israel has claimed that it reached unofficial agreements with the Bush administration to keep building in existing settlements. It also has cited a 2004 letter signed by Bush in which the U.S. leader said a future peace deal would recognize "new realities on the ground" in the West Bank.
Many of the understandings were reached between 2001 and 2003, according to Dov Weisglass, who was a top aide to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The Bush administration agreed to allow construction inside the boundaries of existing settlements, Weisglass told Army Radio, though he said the precise delineation of those boundaries was never hammered out "for technical reasons."
However, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in weekend comments that the White House would not recognize past informal understandings. "That was never made a part of the official record of the negotiations," Clinton said in comments broadcast Sunday on ABC TV.
The U.S. pressure is pushing Netanyahu into a difficult position, caught between preserving the all-important alliance with Washington while also keeping his hawkish coalition intact.
The government is committed to maintaining an Israeli presence on West Bank land, and Netanyahu has demanded the right to continue building to account for the ill-defined "natural growth" of the existing settler population.
Since Israel signed its first accord with the Palestinians in 1993, the West Bank settler population has more than doubled to nearly 300,000. An additional 180,000 Jews live in neighbourhoods in east Jerusalem, the sector of the city that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war and which Palestinians claim as capital of their hoped-for state.
Obama plans to dispatch his special Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, to the region this week to try to break the impasse. Mitchell has long seen a settlement freeze as intrinsic to progress on peacemaking.
In a separate development Sunday, Israel said it had awarded roughly $82,000 in compensation to Palestinian families whose properties were damaged in rioting last year in the West Bank city of Hebron.
Jewish extremists went on a rampage last December to protest the forced evictions of dozens of Jewish settlers who had taken over a disputed building.
Guy Inbar, a military spokesman, said 50 families had applied for compensation, and all requests were approved.
