The Israeli government was rocked Wednesday by sharp disagreements among Cabinet ministers over who will be representing the country at next week’s Middle East peace conference in Madrid.
Serious rivalries have surfaced in recent days between the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign Ministry, which each want to supply the top negotiators for the conference and the series of bilateral talks that will follow.
The strains hit the breaking point Wednesday night, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir announced that he would personally head the Israeli delegation to the peace conference and that he would hand-pick some of its other members.
Foreign Minister David Levy immediately announced that he would stay home, prompting speculation that he would resign his post.
Shamir, Levy and Defense Minister Moshe Arens had held consultations earlier Wednesday, in an attempt to resolve the composition of the Israeli delegation. But those talks apparently ended inconclusively.
Shamir wants to entrust the most delicate diplomatic tasks to non-diplomats.
He insists that his two closest aides, Yosef Ben-Aharon, director of the Prime Minister’s Office, and Cabinet Secretary Elyakim Rubinstein, head the delegations to the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian talks respectively.
The Defense Ministry has been assigned to run the talks with Lebanon, probably because the Lebanese border presents the only active military problem at this time.
That leaves the Foreign Ministry with the multilateral working group on regional issues, which may not get off the ground if Syria holds to its refusal to participate.
PROVOKED BY STATEMENTS ON PLO
Meanwhile, aides to Shamir said Wednesday night that the prime minister had decided to bring a number of hard-liners with him to Madrid, including Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Knesset member Ze’ev “Benny” Begin and a West Bank Jewish settler.
If true, that would only rankle Levy further, as relations between the moderate foreign minister and his hawkish deputy had reportedly reached a low point of late.
Opposition Labor Party politicians immediately accused Shamir of trying to sabotage the peace conference.
But political observers pointed out that the Likud prime minister had been provoked almost beyond endurance by the flurry of Palestinian claims in recent days that Israel would be negotiating with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The latest of these came Wednesday when one of the official Palestinian delegates, Saeb Erekat, told the Cable News Network outright that the group going to Madrid was a “PLO delegation.”
Shamir aide Ben-Aharon immediately responded that Israel would regard Erekat as an unacceptable negotiator.
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