The Arabs’ decision to return to the Middle East peace talks has vindicated the Clinton administration’s stubborn refusal to press Israel for further concessions, according to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Reacting to an announcement Wednesday by the Arab states and the Palestinians that they would return to Washington for a ninth round of peace talks next Tuesday, Rabin said that, contrary to media reports, Israel had not agreed to make any further gestures in order to lure the Palestinians back to the talks.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres confirmed that no concessions would be forthcoming beyond the deal worked out with the United States in early February regarding the gradual return of Palestinian activists deported by Israel to Lebanon last December.
But he hinted that some gestures by Israel might be made once the negotiations actually resume in Washington.
The Arab decision to return to the talks was announced Wednesday in Damascus by Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa.
Hours later, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced in Washington that all parties to the talks would show up there for the ninth round of negotiations next Tuesday, a week later than originally planned.
Christopher welcomed the Arab decision. He said a number of countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, played important roles in persuading the Palestinians to resume the talks, which had been stalled for four months.
The previous round ended in mid-December and never resumed following Israel’s expulsion of 415 Moslem extremists from the administered territories.
Last month, the United States and Russia invited the parties to return to the talks April 20. But the Palestinians refused, listing a number of unsatisfied demands, and the Arab states had little choice but to close ranks behind them.
A DISPUTE OVER ‘ASSETS’
The issue of Israeli gestures or concessions to the Palestinians had been a focus of the efforts to get the stalled talks resumed.
In a debate Wednesday in the Knesset, Health Minister Haim Ramon sharply attacked the Palestinians for “negotiating prior to negotiating.”
But Ramon, a member of the Labor Party, promised that in the peace negotiations themselves Israel would offer concessions for peace.
Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, in his new role as leader of the opposition, criticized numerous gestures the government had already undertaken toward the Palestinians.
Listing 19 such concessions, Netanyahu said the most dangerous was Israel’s willingness to include Jerusalem resident Faisal Husseini in the Palestinian delegation.
The proposed move, Netanyahu claimed, would in effect be interpreted as a signal that eastern Jerusalem would be considered as part of the territory to be placed under Palestinian autonomy.
“The Berlin Wall has fallen, and now you are trying to rebuild the Jerusalem Wall,” said the Likud chairman.
But Rabin and other Labor Party leaders have repeatedly said that Jerusalem would remain united under complete Israeli sovereignty and that the acceptance of Husseini as a peace negotiator would not affect that longstanding Israeli position in the least.
Ramon said the real dispute between the government and Likud is over what “assets” Likud is blaming the government of “selling out.”
“I understand that you define as an asset the fact that every morning, some 120,000 Palestinians from the territories come to Israel,” said Ramon.
“You also regard as an asset the annexation of 2 million Palestinians to Israel, whereas I really admit that I want to get rid of those assets.”
“You regard the Jabalya refugee camp as an asset, and we regard it as just the opposite,” he said, referring to a teeming Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
There were also divisions in the Palestinian camp. Two original members of the Palestinian negotiating team, Ghassan al-Khatib and Samir Abdullah, announced Wednesday that they were quitting, in protest of the decision to return to the talks with Israel.
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