Palestinian officials have formally requested that the state of Palestine become a signatory to 15 international treaties and conventions, a move that further imperils the Obama administration's campaign to forge a Middle East peace agreement.
Letters formally asking for Palestinian inclusion in the accords were delivered Wednesday morning by Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Maliki to Robert Serry, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, and the Dutch and Swiss envoys to the Palestinian Authority. The officials were meeting in the West Bank city of Jericho.
The White House's campaign to forge a Middle East peace agreement appeared near collapse Tuesday, despite a U.S. move to negotiate the release of a convicted American spy in a last-gasp effort to win more concessions from Israel. Aaron David Miller reports. Photo: AP.
The Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization said the requests didn't indicate that the Palestinians were withdrawing from U.S.-sponsored talks with Israel, which are facing an April 29 deadline to agree on a framework for final-status talks.
Israel's delay on the release of 26 Palestinian prisoners had freed the Palestinian officials of their commitment to freeze the treaty-application process, the agency's statement said.
In 2012, the Palestinians, frustrated with the pace of negotiated efforts to attain statehood, won nonmember observer status at the United Nations, a successful bid for international recognition that outraged the Israelis.
There was no immediate reaction from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the Israel's housing minister, Uri Ariel, told Israel Radio that the government should retaliate against the Palestinians by approving thousands of new housing units for Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
"The response needs to be fast, sharp and large," Mr. Ariel said.
The Palestinians' formal applications to enter into the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and 13 other accords that form the foundation of the U.N. system and international humanitarian law came one day after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry canceled a meeting with Mr. Abbas and left the region.
Speaking with reporters in Brussels late Tuesday, Mr. Kerry said it was "completely premature" to declare the peace talks finished following Mr. Abbas's announcement of the Palestinians' treaty bid and a U.S. move to negotiate the release of a convicted American spy, Jonathan Pollard, in a last-gasp effort to win more concessions from Israel.
Protesters called for the release of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard at a 2013 demonstration in Jerusalem.European Pressphoto Agency
A formal breakdown in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, which the White House stressed hasn't occurred, would throw into turmoil President Barack Obama's second-term foreign-policy agenda, already reeling from rising tensions with Russia and an inability to stop the civil war in Syria.
Mr. Obama has said solving the Mideast conflict is one of three main international objectives of his second term. Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday criticized his administration's last-minute discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to offer up Mr. Pollard to persuade the Israelis to make good on previous promises to release prisoners. They called it a sign of a White House desperate for a major foreign-policy success.
"Releasing Pollard, in the context of the current peace-process travails, is bad policy," said Aaron David Miller, who served for some two decades as an adviser to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. "It reflects the weakness and desperation of the administration that is presiding over a peace process not yet ready for prime time."
Mr. Obama's allies on Capitol Hill also questioned the move.
"I've followed this issue closely over the years. It's hard for me to see how releasing Jonathan Pollard would help jump-start Middle East peace talks," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said. "It's one thing to consider releasing him after an agreement has been reached, but it's another to discuss setting him free before that has happened."
White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday that Mr. Obama hasn't made a decision on whether to release Mr. Pollard.
Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday. AFP/Getty Images
Mr. Kerry has made a peace agreement the barometer through which to gauge his tenure, by making dozens of trips to the Mideast over the past year and often holding meetings with Israeli and Arab officials by himself. Mr. Kerry has argued that ending the conflict would bring broader stability to the region and rob extremist groups like al Qaeda of an important recruiting tool.
Despite eight months of negotiations spearheaded by Mr. Kerry, diplomacy appeared to be unraveling.
The U.S. had pressed Mr. Abbas during the negotiations not to move forward with the Palestinian request for treaty membership, which would have given the Palestinians more authority to press grievances. Washington hoped to forestall such a move through Israel's agreement to release Palestinian prisoners and to take other confidence-building steps.
Mr. Netanyahu, though, balked at following through with the prisoner release, infuriating the Palestinian side, and precipitating the U.S. offer of Mr. Pollard in a bid to get more Israeli cooperation.
All three sides have remained tight-lipped about how far the negotiations had progressed since their start in July, including the issue of the prisoner release.
Many members of Mr. Netanyahu's cabinet have vocally opposed the release, which included Arab-Israelis convicted of attacking Jews.
In announcing the Palestinians' intention for treaty membership late Tuesday, Mr. Abbas defied both Israel and the U.S., which cut off funding for his government in 2011 when Mr. Abbas took his statehood bid to the U.N.
"It is our right to turn to U.N. institutions and we had postponed it for nine months and never agreed to give up that right," Mr. Abbas said. He said he would also support a form of "nonviolent resistance" against Israel.
Israeli officials warned that the moves could derail the negotiations completely. "This is a serious escalation," a senior Israeli official said.
The White House, meanwhile, said a formal decision on the 59-year-old Mr. Pollard's future hasn't been formally made.
He is being held in a federal penitentiary in North Carolina, but is eligible for parole next year. Two officials familiar with the negotiations said that under the arrangement Mr. Pollard, who was convicted of espionage in 1985, was to be released in mid-April "before Passover."
In return, Israel was to go ahead with the release of the prisoners. Israel also agreed to release another group of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners at its own discretion in the future, the officials said.
Jonathan Pollard speaking during an interview in a conference room at the Federal Correction Institution in Butner, N.C., on May 15, 1998. Associated Press
Israel also would "act with great restraint" in issuing tenders for new public housing projects in the West Bank, one of the officials said. East Jerusalem, which Israel considers its territory, wasn't part of the deal, nor were projects already authorized, the officials said.
The plan revived an old espionage case that has remained a festering wound between Israeli and American diplomats for decades. Israeli Prime Ministers since Yitzhak Shamir have championed Mr. Pollard's release. Mr. Pollard had sought refuge in the Israeli Embassy before admitting guilt and being sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Pollard's role in the negotiations puts them in uncharted territory. While the U.S. has made large financial offers to get the sides to negotiate, the Pollard case is the first time a spy with no direct connection to the conflict was offered as a bargaining chip.
Efraim Inbar, a professor of political studies at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, said he believed offering up Mr. Pollard was a sign of desperation as the talks were running aground.
"What happened was he was getting desperate and [Mr. Kerry] threw in Pollard," he said. "The issue had nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli negotiations."
In Washington, Republicans and Democrats criticized the move as a sign of the White House wanting the pact more than the negotiating parties.
"I think this is a serious mistake, and it tells me the administration is at wits' end here," said the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) in an MSNBC interview. "I think this is a horrible idea, I think it sends a horrible message."
He said the Pollard case is "completely unrelated" to the proposed release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
The chaos in the Middle East process is expected to hit Mr. Kerry particularly hard.
Mr. Miller, now of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, said the White House and Mr. Kerry had "allowed short-term considerations to drive its bad policy outcomes.…Mercifully, that deal [for Pollard] didn't go through."
Mr. Kerry, though, said he hadn't given up with his quest "We're going to continue to do our work. We're going to continue because this matters—matters to the region, matters to the parties, matters to us, matters to the world," he said at a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Prospects of Mr. Pollard's release have stirred strong opposition from U.S. intelligence agencies in the past. George Tenet, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, threatened to resign when Mr. Pollard's release became an issue in the 1998 talks leading to the Wye River memorandum between Israelis and Palestinians and overseen by President Bill Clinton.
"I've worked very hard to restore morale at the agency," Mr. Tenet told Mr. Clinton, according to the former spy chief's memoir, "At the Center of the Storm." "If a spy is let out as a consequence of these negotiations, I will never be able to lead my building." The memo was ultimately signed without Mr. Pollard's release.
"There will be some angst [about Pollard's potential release], though nowhere near where we were with Tenet," a former intelligence official said. "People realize he's up for parole and likely to get it because of his health."
A spokesman for Mr. Tenet said Tuesday that the former director didn't want to weigh in on Tuesday's discussions.
—Siobhan Gorman, Mohammed Najib and Naftali Bendavid contributed to this article.