While Israelis and Palestinians have agreed to resume their talks, the two sides are offering widely varying estimates of how long it will take to reach an agreement.
Breaking a 10-day deadlock in their talks, Israeli and Palestine Liberation Organization negotiators said five negotiators from each side will meet daily, beginning Monday, at the Sinai border town of Taba until they resolve all the issues facing them.
But how long that will take depends on who is making the estimate.
Israeli ministers, after a briefing by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday, predicted it would take up to two months of intensive talks to resolve the two sides’ differences.
“There are literally hundreds of issues to be dealt with,” one Cabinet source said.
But Nabil Sha’ath, the chief PLO negotiator in Taba, told reporters on Sunday that the negotiations could be completed in two to three weeks.
Environment Minister Yossi Sarid, a member of the Israeli negotiating team in Cairo before the talks reached a standstill, dismissed Sha’ath’s estimate as wishful thinking.
“If he turns out to be right, I’ll be the first to applaud,” Sarid said on Sunday. “But better to be realistic than over-optimistic.”
Considerably more is at stake than which estimate will turn out to be right.
Six or eight more weeks of negotiations might mean that the two sides could miss their next deadline – April 13 – when, according to the self-rule accord the two sides signed last September, Israel is scheduled to complete troop withdrawals from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho.
Moreover, protracted Israeli-palestinian negotiations could upset the carefully laid U.S. plans to reactivate in the coming weeks the Israeli-Syrian negotiations, which have been stalled for months.
President Clinton is scheduled to meet in Geneva on Jan. 16 with Syrian President Hafez Assad, who for many years was regarded in Washington as an inveterate hard-liner and a supporter of regional and international terrorism.
The United States is not yet ready to embrace Assad. But the meeting between the two leaders is regarded by both sides as a potential turning point.
Syria, bereft of a superpower backer after the fall of the Soviet Union, is anxious to win the favor of the American government.
The United States is determined to follow an Israeli-PLO accord with an Israeli-Syrian pact that would hold out the promise of long-term stability in the Middle East.
The big question, Rabin was reported as telling the Cabinet on Sunday, is whether the Syrian leader will speak clearly with Clinton about his concept of peace with Israel.
Rabin has demanded that Syria establish a “full peace” with Israel – including open borders, free trade and an exchange of ambassadors – in exchange for Israel’s return of the Golan Heights.
Rabin and his Labor Party are fighting hard to keep their coalition majority intact in the face of shrinking public support for the accord with the Palestinians.
A “second front” – political controversy over an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights – could well prove too much for Rabin to handle.
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