By
The Associated Press
JERUSALEM - A car bomb exploded yesterday in Jerusalem, injuring one person, sending wreckage into the air and prompting a warning from Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon to the Palestinians that he will not negotiate as long as such attacks continued.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast that went off shortly before 5 p.m. in a side street of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Beit Shmuel. But it came amid fears of Islamic militant attacks after Sharon's election as Israel's prime minister this week.
Speaking to reporters after the blast, Sharon said he informed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in a message sent earlier in the day that Israel was interested in resuming peace talks that broke off last month.
"The government I will lead will make every effort to reach peace, but the condition for starting peace talks is the cessation of terror and violence," Sharon said.
But a senior Sharon adviser said earlier that the prime minister-elect rejects a key Palestinian demand that peace talks resume at the point they stopped under Israel's previous government.
Sharon does not feel bound by the concessions his predecessor, Ehud Barak, made to the Palestinians, said the adviser, Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.
"There were offers by the previous government. All that was said, either verbally or as ideas, does not commit Israel or any government," Shoval said a day after the Palestinian Cabinet affirmed the demand for continuity in the talks.
President Bush called Arafat yesterday, an Arafat aide said. The Palestinian leader reaffirmed his commitment to settling the conflict with Israel peacefully, said the aide, Nabil Aburdeneh.
Palestinian officials said they have low expectations that negotiations, if they eventually resume, can produce results. Sharon has ruled out more land concessions and said he was only interested in reaching an interim, not a final agreement.
Palestinian officials said privately they did not expect Sharon to stay in power for too long. Sharon will be forced to step down if he fails to form a coalition and get a 2001 budget approved by March 31. Sharon is courting Barak's center-left Labor party which would lend his government greater stability.
Sharon said yesterday that he was determined to bring Labor into his government "as quickly as possible. If rebuffed, he would have to work with a slew of right-wing, religious and small centrist factions with conflicting agendas.
Negotiations with Labor were to begin yesterday evening. Barak, who said he would resign as party leader, announced yesterday that he would lead his party's negotiating team before stepping down.
In the final days of his government, Barak offered the Palestinians a state in about 95 percent of the West Bank and control over parts of Jerusalem.
He indicated his willingness to partially relinquish Israeli sovereignty over a disputed hilltop in the Old City of Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound was built above the ruins of the biblical Jewish Temples, a site sacred to Muslims and Jews and claimed by both.
The Palestinians said Barak's proposals did not go far enough, but were engaged in intense negotiations with Israel in January, before Israeli voters turned Barak out of office in elections Tuesday by a huge margin, 62.5 percent to 37.4 percent.
Demonstrating his stance, Sharon on Wednesday visited the Western Wall, sacred to Jews as the retaining wall of the disputed hilltop holy site. He declared that Jerusalem would remain united under Israeli rule, "with the Temple Mount at its center for all eternity," using the Jewish name for the site.
The current wave of Palestinian unrest came after Sharon's Sept. 28 visit to the hilltop to demonstrate Israeli sovereignty. Since then, 385 people have been killed in clashes and attacks, including 323 Palestinians, 13 Israeli Arabs, 48 other Israelis and one German doctor.
Sharon has said he would not give the Palestinians any more territory than they now control, 42 percent of the West Bank and two-thirds of the Gaza Strip, but aides said that under some circumstances, he would carry out provisions of an interim agreement that would require Israel to hand over additional territory.
Then, said Sharon confidant Reuven Rivlin, Sharon might agree to remove isolated Israeli settlements in the West Bank as part of the implementation. During the election campaign, Sharon said all settlements would remain where they are.
