Arabs and Israel Still Jockeying over when to Reconvene Peace Talks

While maintaining publicly that it will not set a new date for peace talks between Israel and three separate Arab delegations, the Bush administration is working behind the scenes to get the various parties to resume the bilateral negotiations begun in Madrid last month.

Israel, which did not show up Wednesday for the scheduled resumption of the talks, has said its delegates will turn up Monday. But the Palestinians have rejected that date, since it is the fourth anniversary of their intifada, or uprising.

That left the prospect that Monday could turn into a repeat of Wednesday, only this time with the empty chairs belonging to Syria, Lebanon and the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.

The Arab delegations each met separately Thursday with Edward Djerejian, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. They reportedly requested that the United States set a new starting date, so they would not be in the position of agreeing to Israel’s timetable.

But State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said the United States would not do that. “There will be no new co-sponsor proposal,” she said.

The U.S. position seemed to be designed to pressure the Arabs to deal directly with Israel on the issue of when to resume the negotiations. There were reports that informal Arab-Israeli talks on that subject could take place as early as Friday.

Benjamin Netanyahu, a deputy minister in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, complained here Wednesday that Israeli officials have repeatedly tried to contact the Arab delegations to discuss the timing of the direct talks, but “they have not picked up the phone.”

A ‘PUBLIC RELATIONS DISASTER’?

Netanyahu told American Jewish organizational leaders in New York on Thursday that there now “seemed to be a reciprocal agreement” between the United States and Israel to “lower the decibel” level of public statements, in the interest of getting the talks back on track.

According to Rabbi Joseph Sternstein, chairman of the American Zionist Youth Foundation, Netanyahu cited statements by U.S. officials emphasizing Israel’s decision to show up at the peace talks later rather than never and their use of “rather pallid terms” to describe Israel’s absence Wednesday.

Netanyahu appeared at a private meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, in order to “defuse what he anticipated to be great concern, perhaps even anger, over the public relations disaster” Israel suffered by not showing up at the talks on time, said Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress.

There is “no question” that Israel “suffered a public relations defeat,” said Siegman. “They helped reinforce a developing image in the American media and the international media that they are being dragged to the peace conference,” he said.

Siegman questioned whether “that defeat was necessary” to “make the point that the Arab parties must deal directly with them. I am not at all persuaded that they needed to incur this loss.”

“There is a wide consensus in the Jewish community that as important as that point is, it could have been made without incurring the kind of damage,” Siegman added.

But Sternstein said that “even though there may have been temporary diminution in public relations, it was more important to make the political lesson very clear.”

“I don’t think the damage is what many thought” it would be, said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive director of the Conference of Presidents. If and when the talks resume and they proceed well, “that will be the lasting impression,” he said.

Morris Amitay, treasurer of Washington Political Action Committee, one of the largest pro-Israel PACs, praised the Israeli move as “badly needed to put a stop to the United States trying to dictate a peace settlement.”

He said that with the resignation of White House Chief of Staff John Sununu and the Florida rape trial of William Kennedy Smith, both of which have made big headlines in American newspapers, Israel’s failure to show up “was a back page story, and it was really no story anyway, because people knew ahead of time that the Israelis weren’t going to come.”

Some Jewish organizational leaders would not take a public stand on Israel’s decision to delay showing up in Washington.

David Harris, executive vice president of the American Jewish Committee, said, “I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to second-guess” the decision at a time of “very delicate negotiating efforts.”

But he added that the delay in reconvening the talks will likely end up being only a “minor blip on the screen.”