US visit boosts Olmert's unilateral plan

JERUSALEM, May 25 (Reuters) Forget the talk about giving peacemaking a chance, Israel's Ehud Olmert took another important step in Washington towards carrying out a unilateral plan for imposing a border with the Palestinians.

The shift in US language to describe Prime Minister Olmert's ideas for dividing up the occupied West Bank from ''interesting'' to ''bold'' might not look like much, but was more than the Israelis had expected in advance.

The insistence by both Olmert and President George W Bush that diplomacy with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would have to be tried before unilateral measures was seen in Israel as neither particularly unexpected nor meaningful.

''Nobody takes this seriously, neither Americans nor Israelis,'' said political analyst Gerald Steinberg.

''It's a charade. They're going to go through the motions of talking to Abbas and certainly Olmert knows that is not going to produce anything.'' Unilateral Israeli moves would mean giving up remote settlements on occupied land, but also expanding bigger settler blocs, taking in swathes of territory the Palestinians seek for a state in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip.

''Olmert's plan is the most dangerous plan proposed in 10 years,'' said Mohammad Dahlan, an Abbas ally.

Olmert is expected to meet Abbas in coming weeks, but any talks would be far from amounting to negotiations for Palestinian statehood.

Progress would depend not only on Abbas, a moderate, but the Hamas Islamist-led Palestinian government, which is formally committed to destroying Israel and has rejected Western calls to renounce violence and accept past peace deals.

A sporadically violent power struggle between Abbas's Fatah and Hamas will do nothing to strengthen prospects for talks no matter who wins out.

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