US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Israel today evening for top-level talks aimed at giving a push to revived Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
Tomorrow, he will meet Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in the West Bank city of Bethlehem and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem.
His latest round of shuttle diplomacy finds Palestinians enraged at growing Israeli settlement construction, while local media reported today that Israeli negotiators sought to have the separation barrier that cuts through the West Bank serve as the border of a future Palestinian state.
"Israel's opening position was that the border be the route of the separation barrier, and not the 1967 lines as the Palestinians have demanded," public radio said in a report which also featured in the top-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper.
Since peace talks began in late July, ending a three-year freeze, the Palestinians have repeatedly complained about Israel's lack of clarity on the issue of borders.
The Palestinians insist the talks be based on the lines that existed before the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank, including Arab east Jerusalem.
But Netanyahu has rejected any return to the 1967 lines as "indefensible," saying that would not take into account the "demographic changes on the ground" over the past 46 years, in a clear euphemism for Jewish settlements.
Israel began work on its sprawling "security fence" in 2002 at the height of the second intifada, and has defended its construction as a crucial protective measure, pointing to a drop in attacks inside Israel as proof of its success.
The Palestinians, who refer to it as the "apartheid wall," say the barrier is a land grab, pointing out that when complete, 85 percent of it will have been built inside the West Bank.
There was no confirmation of the report from Netanyahu's office, which has refused to comment on the content of the ongoing peace talks in line with a US-requested media blackout.
Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who oversaw the start of the barrier's construction, repeatedly insisted that the barrier was not a border for a future Palestinian state but only a measure to keep out suicide bombers.
