Haaretz: Israel ready to grant Palestinians "less than state status"

Israel would agree to upgrade the Palestinian Authority's status at the United Nations as long as it is not declared a state, according to the Israeli Prime Minister. Benjamin Netanyahu expressed this stance in talks with Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, over the past few days, the Israeli mass-circulation, the Haaretz, reported on Friday. Netanyahu said on Thursday that his speech to the United Nations would stress that negotiations are the only road to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. "The General Assembly is not a place where Israel usually receives a fair hearing," he said at a press conference with Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas at his Jerusalem residence. "But I still decided to tell the truth before anyone who would like to hear it." Netanyahu is scheduled to speak at 2 A.M. Israel time, a few hours after PA President Mahmoud Abbas, at the upcoming UN General Assembly session. He continued his talks with U.S. envoys, Dennis Ross and David Hale on Thursday, as well as Ashton and Quartet envoy Tony Blair, in an attempt to reach a compromise that would prevent an Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the UN. But no breakthrough was made, and the PA's appeal to the United Nations next week is regarded as inevitable. Netanyahu told his interlocutors that granting the PA the status of a state would allow the Palestinians to go to the International Criminal Court in The Hague over issues like settlement construction. "But as long as it is less than a state, I'm ready to talk about it," a source familiar with the conversation quoted him as saying. One of Netanyahu's advisers also said that Israel would not object to the PA's status being upgraded as long as it is not recognized as a state. Both U.S. officials and Blair have been pressuring Ashton over the past few days to quash a French-Spanish initiative under which the EU's 27 members would unanimously support a General Assembly resolution upgrading the PA's status at the United Nations to that of a non-member state. This initiative would give the PA the same status the Vatican now has. In exchange, the PA would not ask the Security Council to grant it full UN membership or file charges against Israelis in the ICC, also according to Haaretz.