By Ethan Bronner and Mark Landler
The pledge by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to push for a new, one-time-only freeze of 90 days on settlement construction in the West Bank represents a bet by the Israelis and the Americans that enough can be accomplished so that the Palestinians will not abandon peace talks even after the freeze ends.
But the freeze proposal, which was reached in intensive negotiations with the United States and still needs Israeli government approval - Mr. Netanyahu presented it to his cabinet on Sunday - carries huge risks for all sides. Even before the cabinet began to consider it, both the Israeli right and the Palestinian leadership raised strong objections.
And for the Obama administration, which promised not to seek any further construction freezes as a precondition for securing this one, it is unclear what will happen to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process if this freeze, like the last one, comes and goes without a Palestinian commitment to remain in negotiations with Israel on creation of a Palestinian state.
Under the proposed freeze, negotiated by Mr. Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during nearly eight hours of talks in New York last Thursday, the Israelis would stop most construction on settlements in the West Bank for 90 days to break an impasse in the peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
Those negotiations began in Washington in early September, but soon faltered over Palestinian anger at resumed settlement construction, when a previous 10-month freeze ended.
In return, the Israelis would receive 20 advanced American fighter jets and other unspecified military aid, as well as American promises to oppose any Palestinian attempt to obtain international recognition of statehood in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza without Israeli agreement.
The United States would veto a United Nations Security Council resolution along those lines and actively work against similar resolutions in forums where it does not have a veto.
Both Israeli and American officials said that final borders could not be negotiated in three months, but they hoped enough progress could be made on exchanging settlement blocks for other land, as well as other significant issues, so that a settlement freeze would no longer be a Palestinian demand for moving forward.
The vote by Mr. Netanyahu's cabinet on the proposal is expected to be very close but it was likely to pass by at least one vote, analysts said. Likewise, while the Palestinians have objected partly because the proposed construction freeze does not include East Jerusalem, which they want as the capital of their future state, that is not considered an issue likely to dissuade them from rejoining the talks.
President Obama, returning from his Asia trip, praised the tentative deal worked out by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Netanyahu. "I think it is promising," Mr. Obama told reporters aboard Air Force One.
"I commend Prime Minister Netanyahu for taking, I think, a very constructive step. It's not easy for him to do, but I think it's a signal that he is serious."
Obama administration officials said they believed that the Israelis and Palestinians could make enough progress on the contours of a Palestinian state to largely set aside the dispute over settlements.
Under the most likely outcome, said a person close to the negotiations, the two sides would agree that several large West Bank settlement blocks would be kept in Israeli territory, and Israel would exchange a commensurate amount of land to compensate the Palestinians for that territory.
Drawing the exact border lines could be left for later in the negotiations, but a general agreement on the shape of a state would make the settlements recede in importance, this person said. The two sides would not have to settle delicate issues like the status of Jerusalem in the first 90 days. The point of the extension, the official said, is to allow the negotiations to gain enough traction to continue without further disruption.
Mr. Netanyahu continues to negotiate with the Obama administration about details of the American offer - for example, over the terms on which the American fighter planes would be delivered to Israel. Some of the elements of the offer, including the military hardware and a security pact between Israel and the United States, are things that the administration would most likely have offered later, when Israel was close to signing a final agreement, according to officials and analysts.
"The fact that this is front loaded, visible, and that Jerusalem by agreement is left out of the moratorium - not to mention all the political stuff related to the U.N. - is a sweet deal" for Mr. Netanyahu, said Aaron David Miller, a veteran of peace negotiations who is now a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
The initial reaction by conservative Israeli politicians was to oppose the deal, saying that the previous 10-month settlement freeze was a one-time gesture and ought not to be extended. They emphasized that for the first nine of those 10 months, the Palestinians did not negotiate. They also argued that if the aim of the 90 days was to establish future borders, too much would be given away by Israel before a comprehensive agreement was reached.
"Here we are going with a process in which we give up all the land of Israel but the other issues still exist," Silvan Shalom, minister of regional cooperation and a member of Mr. Netanyahu's Likud party, told Israel Radio.
"If Israel has a three-month freeze, the pressure to establish borders will be unbearable."
The West Bank, although inhabited by millions of Palestinians, is the heartland of much ancient Jewish history, so for many Israelis, giving it up is a painful prospect and should come only as part of a comprehensive deal including Palestinian recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.
Mr. Netanyahu is still hoping to obtain that statement from the Palestinians as part of these talks. The Israeli argument all along has been that making peace talks contingent on a settlement freeze is a mistake, but once the Obama administration did so, it was impossible for the Palestinians to ask for less.
The proposed freeze would include any construction started since the last freeze ended on Sept. 26. That would stem the building units already going up, although once the 90-day period ended, they would probably begin again.
