U.S. reaches out to Palestinians, Israel

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is making a final effort to avert a diplomatic crisis over a Palestinian drive to win UN recognition as an independent state that threatens to provoke a regional meltdown and further isolate Israel, the top U.S. ally in the Mideast.

The administration's top two Mideast envoys were leaving yesterday for Israel and the Palestinian territories to try to persuade the Palestinians to drop their UN plans and bring both sides back to long-stalled talks. At the same time, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns was visiting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates this week, in part to seek Arab support for a still-undefined plan that could defuse the situation.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she was sending David Hale, the special envoy for Middle East peace, and Dennis Ross, the top Mideast adviser at the National Security Council, to try "to create a sustainable platform for negotiations that can produce the two-state outcome that we seek."

"Our hope is we get the parties back into a frame of mind and into a process where they actually begin negotiating again," Clinton told reporters at the State Department.

Hale and Ross were to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas today and Thursday before returning ahead of the UN General Assembly session that begins Tuesday in New York.

The two were in the region last week but failed to persuade Palestinian officials to abandon their quest for UN recognition. Palestinian officials say they will take their resolution to the UN and use their desired recognition to gain leverage with Israel.

Israel is vehemently opposed to such a move and the United States has said it will veto it in the UN Security Council. The Palestinians have suggested that they may seek a vote on recognition in the General Assembly, where the United States cannot veto it and it is likely to pass.

Israel and the United States insist that the United Nations is not the forum to create a state and that a future Palestine must come as the result of direct negotiations.

"We need an environment that is conducive to direct negotiations," Clinton said of the goal of the Hale-Ross mission.