Deferring entity resolution

I'm using XSLT to do a series of transformations, taking FOO.XML and
transforming it into BAR.XML, then transforming bar.xml into ALPHA.TXT,
BETA.TXT, and GAMMA.TXT.  FOO.XML contains ≤ and ≥ entites.  Is there
any way to defer resolution of these entites while resolving a large number
of remaining entities?  I would like to simply copy the reference into the
BAR.XML document without modification.  If I use ENTITY declarations of
"≤" or "≤" or "≤" in the DTD associated with FOO.XML, the
parser complains of a recursive entity expansion.  Any ideas?  Thanks.

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