Islamic militant condemns any Camp David agreement, calls for Arafat to give up

Optimism in short supply as three-way summit prepares for second week

July 17, 2000
Web posted at: 2:13 p.m. EDT (1813 GMT)

Clinton sits between Barak and Arafat at dinner during the summit at Camp David

In this story: Israelis hold firm Clinton: 'It's really hard' Demonstrations in the Middle East RELATED STORIES, SITES

GAZA CITY, Gaza (CNN) -- While Israelis and Palestinians struggled at the Camp David summit with the same issues that have dogged them for years, a militant Islamic spiritual leader on Monday urged Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to withdraw from the negotiations.

Sheik Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of the Hamas group, told reporters that the summit was doomed to fail the Palestinians.

"I consider any agreement that might be reached at Camp David to be a failure because it is not what the Palestinians are looking for," he said.

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In the seventh day of an intense series of meetings hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton at the Maryland presidential retreat, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat face intense political pressure not to compromise on issues such as borders, the status of Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and access to limited water resources.

"I don't expect that Arafat will (compromise) because he knows it would be the end of him politically," said Yassin.

Isarelis hold firm

Barak also appeared unlikely to bend, with right-wing opponents threatening to topple his already-fragile coalition government -- despite polls that show most Israelis willing to compromise to reach peace with the Palestinians.

"(Barak) is not optimistic," said Israeli Knesset speaker Avraham Burg after speaking with the prime minister by phone. "He said he wants to reach an agreement but that we are not there yet."

Adding to the pressure is Clinton's pending departure, currently scheduled for Wednesday morning, for the G8 summit in Japan. White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said there are currently no plans to delay either Clinton's departure or the summit's continuation.

"The plan is to complete this process before the president goes," he told reporters on Monday.

Lockhart added that "the pace of the negotiations had intensified" over the last two evenings, with meetings continuing late into the night and restarting almost immediately after breakfast.

U.S. and Palestinian delegates in the teams negotiating the non-core issues also continued intense meetings at nearby Emmitsburg, Maryland, Lockhart said.

Clinton: 'It's really hard'

Clinton broke a media blackout about the summit on Sunday in an interview with the New York Daily News, admitting that the negotiations were "hard ... like nothing I have ever dealt with." But he added that he was "more optimistic" for success than at the summit's start.

"I would be totally misleading if I said that a deal was at hand," the American president said in Sunday's interview. "That's just not true. But we are slogging."

"They're trying," he said. "It's really hard."

"What's really troubling is that they know if they make a peace agreement, half of their constituencies will have to be angry with them for a while," Clinton added.

Despite Clinton's optimism, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians seemed to hold much hope that an agreement was within reach.

A senior Israeli official told CNN that unless there was breakthrough on Monday, "Prime Minister Barak has nothing more to do here."

And Palestinian officials acknowledged that there had been some progress but not toward an agreement.

Demonstrations in the Middle East

A right-wing Israeli activist shouts at left-wing protesters during a rally in Tel Aviv

In the Middle East, meanwhile, Israelis and Palestinians held separate demonstrations related to the talks. The larger rally, by an estimated 150,000 right-wing Israelis, condemned Barak's peace efforts.

The Tel Aviv rally was organized by settler organizations and the opposition Likud Party, whose chairman, Ariel Sharon, told the gathering: "Before us, to my regret and I say it with sorrow, is a prime minister who threatens his people with terrorism, with war, with an 'intifada' (uprising) and enlists world leaders, ministers and political activists to join in his threats."

Earlier on Sunday, Sharon, in an interview with CNN, said Barak was seeking the "wrong peace."

"Everyone in Israel wants peace -- wants secure, safe, real, lasting peace. But that is not what Barak is proposing," Sharon said. "I'm afraid what Barak brings to us is the wrong peace. We are looking for a better peace, a safer peace, more serious peace."

In the Palestinian-ruled West Bank city of Nablus, about 400 marchers shouted slogans on Sunday calling for a sovereign Palestinian state, for Israel to evacuate all territories it occupied in 1967, and for the right of Palestinian refugees to return -- all demands of Palestinian negotiators.

Various Palestinian factions participated, including supporters of the radical group Hamas, who called for resistance and jihad (holy struggle) "as the only option to liberate Palestine."

CNN White House Correspondent Kelly Wallace, State Department Correspondent Andrea Koppel, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Mike Hanna, CNN Correspondent Jerrold Kessel, CNN.com Senior Writer KC Wildmoon, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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