Hussein Says U.S. and Israel Are Obstacles to Peace Talks

It is Israel and the United States, rather than the Palestine Liberation Organization, that are blocking Middle East peace negotiations, King Hussein of Jordan maintained Sunday.

“I believe if there is any intransigence — and there is indeed — it is in the Israeli position that hasn’t changed, and up to now the United States position,” he said in an interview on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” program.

Hussein said that both PLO leader Yasir Arafat and the Palestine National Council at its meeting in Algiers last week have accepted the conditions the United States has set for meeting with the PLO.

The Reagan administration said last week that the PNC statements were still ambiguous about these conditions, which are recognition of Israel’s right to exist, acceptance of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and the renunciation of terrorism.

“I believe that our friends in Washington better go back and look at the papers and positions they (the PNC) adopted,” Hussein said. “They will find that there is no difference between their initial demands and requests and suggestions, and what the PLO has come through with now.”

Hussein seemed to back off slightly on his statement on ABC-TV’s “Nightline” before the Israeli elections that if Likud won it would be a “disaster” for Middle East peace prospects.

“If Likud holds on to the policies that it declared before, of in essence saying that Palestine, as it is now under occupation, is our land and we will have peace in place, then there is no hope for peace,” he said Sunday.

“But, on the other hand, if they are speaking of 242 and if they are speaking of its implementation — in other words, territories occupied in June 1967 — then that is an entirely different situation.”