News Analysis: Shultz Winning Few Customers in Efforts to Peddle Peace Plan

Secretary of State George Shultz appears unlikely to win greater acceptance of his peace plan during his current shuttle through the Middle East.

That at least was the conclusion reached by the Labor-backed daily newspaper Davar, which summed up the situation Tuesday in a story headlined, “The Shultz Initiative — A Legacy for the Next Administrations, in the U.S. and in Israel.”

The Davar article cited both American and Israeli officials who felt the secretary’s talks here in Jerusalem had basically “trod water, or chewed the cud.”

The officials predicted, therefore, that Shultz would come away from the region with little substantial progress, unable as yet to ask the Soviets and the United Nations secretary general to convene the non-coercive international conference which, under the terms of his initiative, is to launch direct negotiations between Israel and the Arabs.

Shultz visited Amman and Damascus Tuesday for meetings with Jordan’s King Hussein and President Hafez Assad of Syria. He was to return to Jerusalem that night, and hold further talks here Wednesday morning.

Davar’s downbeat diagnosis implies that George Shultz and his advisers misread the domestic Israeli scene, in that they wrongly felt there was a reasonable chance that a direct approach by the secretary to the people of Israel could help swing opinion behind the initiative.

STILL PERSEVERING

Shultz, however, was still persevering by midweek. He scheduled a second appearance on Israeli television, which was to be taped Wednesday morning for screening that same night. This was to be a lengthy give-and-take on the main weekly talk show, “Moked.”

Shultz came here Sunday night with the belief that his initiative had been misrepresented, whether willfully or without design, and that Israelis thought he sought to drag them to a peace conference where the great powers would make common cause with Arab hard-liners to force Israel into total withdrawal.

His primary concern, therefore, was to tell it, and sell it, to the people of Israel in his own words. He attempted to do this prior to his political meetings with Premier Yitzhak Shamir and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

In a lengthy airport statement, later in a television interview, and then in a session with Israeli newspaper editors, the secretary tried to allay suspicions, correct misapprehensions, assure Israel that he remained a fast friend and that the administration is fully committed to the long-term security of the Jewish state.

To this end, too, he agreed to the scheduling of a formal signing ceremony on Israeli Independence Day, in Jerusalem and Washington, of a Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries.

There is little new of substance in that document. But it incorporates and enshrines all the ongoing cooperation pacts on various levels, and to that extent is a public effort to bind a future administration in Washington to these programs supporting Israel’s defense.

From random person-in-the-street responses, it seems that Shultz has come across to the Israeli public much as he is: warm, straight-talking, well-meaning. But there was no evidence that he has succeeded beyond convincing people here that he is indeed a nice guy.

LIKUD HANGS TOUGH

Likud politicians, their ears close to the ground, continued to put up a barrage of hostile rhetoric during the course of the visit.

“He talks differently here than in the Arab countries… He tells us what we want to hear,” Knesset member Haim Kaufman, a leading figure in Likud’s Herut wing, wrote in a public letter to Shamir on Monday.

And Ronni Milo, another leading Likud Knesseter and close confidant of the premier, said Tuesday that the party and its leader remained as firmly opposed as ever to ceding territory as part of a peace settlement.

On the left, too, there were few illusions that Shultz had made a dramatic impact — though there was warm support and encouragement for his effort to speak to the public here.

Dahn Ben-Amotz, a well-known left-wing writer, urged Shultz, in a humorous open letter to the secretary in Tuesday’s Hadashot, to be even more forthright and to deliver to Shamir “two or three more slaps in the face” like the slap he administered by meeting March 26 with two Palestinian-American members of the Palestine National Council.

Only by doing so, wrote Ben-Amotz, might the people of Israel realize that if the Shultz initiative withers away as a result of Shamir’s obduracy, the likely consequence will be war.

Shultz, however, has carefully avoided any hint of “face-slapping,” or any other forms of verbal violence. There has been no whiff of an across-the-board confrontation between Washington and Jerusalem, and certainly no talk in an election year of squeezing Israel by threatening to reduce aid or military supplies.

To the contrary, Shultz has offered assurances that the relationship is stronger than any differences. And he has bent over backward to avoid linking his current peace efforts to the ongoing uprising in the West Bank and Gaza.

Some in Israel will be frankly disappointed if this remains the tenor of the secretary’s admonitions. Most people will be relieved.