Captain's Quarters -

Ehud Olmert took a step yesterday that not even Ehud Barak made in his quest to reach a comprehensive peace plan with the Palestinians. In Tel Aviv yesterday, Olmert embraced the Saudi initiative, which calls for a partition of Jerusalem, a return to 1967 borders, and the end of all settlements:

In a bid to open a channel to the Arabs, Israel's premier is embracing a long dormant Saudi peace proposal that would divide Jerusalem and could flood the Jewish state with Palestinian Arab refugees with family claims to land evacuated in the 1948 war that created the state.

Speaking in Tel Aviv yesterday, Prime Minister Olmert said Israel was prepared to make "sweeping, painful, and tough concessions" in order to forge open contacts with Arab states that offered in 2002 to acknowledge Israel's right to exist in exchange for its full retreat from the territories it won in the 1967 war.

"The Saudi initiative is interesting and has many sections that I would be willing to accept — though, predictably, not all of them — and it could certainly be a convenient basis for continued dialogue between us and Arab moderates," he said.

Mr. Olmert's embrace of the Saudi initiative, a proposal Saudi Arabia's then crown prince initially shared with a New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, comes just days before the Israeli premier meets with his Palestinian Arab counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, and Secretary of State Rice. A day after their meeting Sunday, Ms. Rice will fly to Aswan, Egypt, for a summit with her Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, and United Arab Emirates counterparts to discuss, one State Department official said, "strategies for marketing the Arab peace offer."

The Israelis have deep divisions over this proposal. Some see it as a reasonable starting ground, while others warn that it amounts to giving the inch that will encourage Hamas to grab the mile. Dore Gold, an ally of Binyamin Netanyahu, responded by insisting that any attempt to partition Jerusalem would only encourage the Palestinians to take the rest by force, and also would attract al-Qaeda affiliates to launch attacks to drive Israel from its share of the city.

In exchange for openness to the Saudi initiative, the Israelis want to see some modifications. The right of return has to go, although the Israelis might still be open to trading more territory in exchange for that point, as Barak suggested at Wye. They want the plan to include "confidence building" stages in order to ensure that Israeli security remains at the forefront. They also want to make sure that the borders Israel accepts are defensible against another attack through the territories -- the reason Israel occupies them in the first place, a point that many conveniently forget. The Arab nations attacked Israel twice through those lands when they belonged to Jordan.

This sounds like a loser to me, however. Israel will not accept the partition of Jerusalem easily, nor will the nation blithely support the dismantling of its settlements in the West Bank. The forced removal of settlers in Gaza created a firestorm of criticism, and that decision involved far fewer settlers in a much less defensible area. Given Olmert's popularity, I doubt he could get the Knesset to sign off on such an agreement. After botching the war and the peace in Lebanon, not too many will trust him with the Saudi initiative.

Condoleezza Rice has another round of diplomatic visits in the region, and she is expected to push the moderation of rhetoric about Israel as a forerunner to regional talks. Rice and the US have likely pushed the Saudi initiative as a replacement for the so-called Roadmap; it's doubtful Olmert would have embraced it on his own. It's hard to understand why the US keeps pushing this on Israel when the Palestinians won't support the treaties they've already signed, let alone agree to bargain in good faith with Israel now. The Bush administration should cease efforts to broker a deal until the Palestinians prove themselves ready to accept peace and a two-state solution as a permanent settlement.