Aqaba, Jordan ? The Palestinian prime minister, the Israeli prime minister and President Bush pledged to pursue Middle East peace Wednesday in carefully crafted comments that were as significant for what they left out as for what they said. Their comments hinted at the land mines and obstacles ahead if this week’s pair of summits are to produce new momentum for negotiations.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in pre-summit talks with U.S. officials, resisted placing any language in his statement that would refer to the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, which are key to his political base, several diplomatic sources said. Sharon was instrumental in spearheading the creation of the settlement movement. At the summit, however, he relented and declared Israel would “immediately begin to remove unauthorized outposts.”

The word “settlement” was not spoken. Sharon drew a distinction between the remote outposts created by Jewish settlers — mostly a few trailers on hilltops — and those authorized by Israeli law. The U.S.-backed peace plan known as the “road map” makes no such distinction between legal and illegal outposts but calls on Israel to dismantle all erected since Sharon took office in March 2001.

Edward Abington, a former State Department official who advises the Palestinians, said the failure to sharpen this distinction was “going to come back to haunt everyone” because it would be easy for settlers to move around the trailers, creating a shell game. If Israel fails to credibly act against the outposts, “it will very quickly undermine the process,” Abington said.

At the same time, Sharon faces difficult domestic pressures, including a commitment to bring key issues involving the road map to his Cabinet for approval, said a U.S. source familiar with the talks between the Israelis and the Americans. “The United States is very eager to see bulldozers knock down settlements,” the source said, because they believe such images will galvanize Arab support for the peace initiative. “Sharon is convinced the Americans don’t appreciate the magnitude of the domestic opposition he faces.”

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas made no acknowledgement of Israel as a “Jewish state,” a long-standing Israel demand.

A Palestinian official said such a statement could never be uttered by a Palestinian official because of the emotional and political weight it carries. It would suggest that Palestinian refugees who left their homes when Israel was founded in 1948 have no right of return and would turn Israeli Arabs into second-class citizens, the official said. The official said the United States did not request that Abbas make such a statement. However, Bush, in his statement, referred to Israel as a “Jewish state.”

Contrasting words

Sharon, for his part, only referred to the creation of a “viable” Palestinian state, in contrast to Abbas’ declaration of an “independent Palestinian state, sovereign, viable.” The road map compels Israel to commit to supporting an “independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state” at the outset of the launch of the plan.

If Sharon were to utter those words in an official statement, it would likely require a Cabinet vote. But in a speech last December, in which he laid out his vision of a peace process, Sharon described the new state in this manner: “This Palestinian state will be completely demilitarized. It will be allowed to maintain lightly armed police and interior forces to ensure civil order. Israel will continue to control all entries and exits to the Palestinian state, will command its airspace, and not allow it to form alliances with Israel’s enemies.”

One phrase uttered by Sharon — “territorial contiguity” — has multiple interpretations. For Palestinians, this means a state that is not cut up into pieces by Israeli settlements and security zones. But Sharon in the past has suggested this could mean “territorial continuity” created by bridges and tunnels that joined Palestinian lands.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, asked about the definition, said “a contiguous state has to be a state that both sides accept and that is viable. It can have an economy, people can move back and forth freely.”

Long road

The West Bank is a quilt of settlements, fences and roads that restrict Palestinians as they try to go to work or travel across the territories. This reality on the ground will make it difficult to fashion a Palestinian state, experts said. A recent Palestinian study concluded that about 30 settlements, with 14,000 settlers, would have to be dismantled to create the territorial contiguity suggested by the Bush administration.

Raanan Gissin, a Sharon spokesman, said that “there will be a need to build bridges and tunnels to ensure when we live together there will be no friction,” a step that was born of “bitter experience.”

While the road map calls for a Palestinian state by 2005, Gissin said, “a political solution is a long process; it doesn’t happen in one generation.”

Indeed, Sharon and Abbas also avoided mentioning Jerusalem, which both sides claim as their capital and which is a vexing “final status” issue that has never been resolved in decades of Middle East diplomacy.