Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Thursday that he and the Labor Party welcome the new American peace plan and that its fate is now up to Likud. But Likud, Labor’s partner in the unity coalition government, apparently has strong reservations.
Addressing Labor’s Central Committee in Tel Aviv, Peres declared Israel is now confronted with “our most important challenge since 1948–and the Likud has no answer. The Likud has got to decide if it wants negotiations with Arabs or without Arabs” and “he who weaves plans without an Arab partner has no plan.”
The American ideas, conveyed to Peres and to Premier Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud leader, by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy here this week, envisions a greatly accelerated peace process with respect both to interim autonomy arrangements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and full-scale negotiations to determine the permanent status of the territories.
Shamir initially balked at the U.S. proposal that permanent status negotiations begin in December, regardless of whether agreement was achieved on the interim arrangements. He argued that this was at odds with the 1978 Camp David accords, which separated the two stages and envisioned a five-year testing period for autonomy.
But Yosef Ben-Aharon, director general of the Prime Minister’s Office told reporters Thursday, “We have no problem with a timetable. Rather, the premier is concerned with the substance of the American thinking.” Shamir has asked Washington for “clarifications” of the proposals Murphy brought here.
Peres said the U.S. was proposing a three part package deal: “An international opening, or, as it is now being called, an international event; an interim settlement based on the autonomy plan; and a permanent settlement based, from the American standpoint, on the Reagan plan.”
The Reagan plan, or “initiative” was enunciated by the president on Sept. 1, 1982 and promptly shelved after it was rejected by the Likud-led government of Premier Menachem Begin. It called for a Palestinian homeland but ruled out a Palestinian state.
Peres noted that the Reagan plan envisaged territorial compromise “but not as we would wish it, much more far-reaching.” He said the U.S. would probably make a commitment to Jordan in advance with respect to Washington’s position in the permanent settlement talks.
“The Likud has got to decide,” Peres said. Labor is “ready to live with this accelerated American program.” But Ben-Aharon said the U.S. plan was not acceptable, because it obliterated the phased approach laid down at Camp David.
Peres maintained that if the agreement he and King Hussein of Jordan reached at a meeting in London last April to convene an international peace conference as a prelude to direct negotiations had been accepted at the time, the situation in the administered territories would not have deteriorated.
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