News Analysis: U.S. Won’t Make Deals with Terrorists but Does Not Mind if Israel Does So

The Bush administration is nudging Israel to do what Washington insists the United States will never do: make deals with hostages.

Washington is not directly pressing Israel publicly or privately to free some or all of the more than 300 Lebanese prisoners it holds to encourage the release of 10 Western hostages in Lebanon.

Rather, it is making the same point by implying that most of the Lebanese prisoners that Israel holds are hostages, too.

President Bush said Sunday that all hostages in the Middle East should be released. He did not specifically name Israel, nor did State Department spokesman Richard Boucher when he expanded on Bush’s statement Tuesday.

“We hold that all people that are being held outside the judicial system in the region should be released,” Boucher said.

He restated the U.S. position that Washington does not “make any deals” with terrorists. “We don’t urge third parties to make any deals.”

The same position was enunciated by Doug Davidson, a White House spokesman, from Bush’s vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

“Our policy is that we will not negotiate for the release of hostages,” Davidson said Tuesday. “But we will not tell others what to do.”

The U.S. position is in contrast to statements by British Prime Minister John Major and U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, who have urged Israel to release some of the Lebanese prisoners in the hope of winning the Western hostages’ freedom.

“Words like ‘reciprocate’ don’t appear in our vocabulary,” Boucher said. He said the U.S. position is that all hostages should be released immediately without conditions.

Israel’s position, even before the terrorists released a British and an American hostage, was that it would free the Lebanese prisoners in return for seven Israeli soldiers being held in Lebanon or, if they are dead, their remains.

On Monday, the Israeli government went a step further, saying it was willing to enter nego- tiations on a prisoner swap if it received information on the fate of the seven missing soldiers.

When Bush was asked about the Israeli concern over its soldiers Tuesday, he replied that “there should be a full accounting.”

U.S. NOT INVOLVED IN GENEVA TALKS

A State Department official pointed out that unlike the United States, Israel has always been willing to deal with terrorists in order to recover captured Israelis. “They kidnap people in order to make deals,” he said of the Israelis.

The official said that Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conceded as much when he said in a television interview Sunday that Israel seized Sheik Abdul Karim Obeid in 1989 to use as leverage to get its soldiers back.

But Netanyahu said that Obeid is the “godfather of the mafia that takes hostages,” not an innocent person kidnapped from the street, as were the Western hostages. He said the Lebanese being held by Israelis are people captured trying to infiltrate into Israel.

Boucher maintained that the United States is not taking any part in the talks Perez de Cuellar is holding in Geneva on the hostages, even as an observer. What the United States is doing is keeping in touch with the United Nations and the countries involved in the situation, he said.

In Kennebunkport, Bush praised Perez de Cuellar on Tuesday for being “willing to go the extra mile.” He said the secretary-general, with whom he had talked Tuesday, was “sure trying hard, and maybe it will have some results.”

But “it’s still murky, still ugly business,” the president stressed. He said the letter Perez de Cuellar received from the Islamic Jihad terrorist group “still needs clarification” and does not give him “any reason to be extraordinarily hopeful.”

The letter, which freed British hostage John McCarthy delivered Sunday to Perez de Cuellar, said that Islamic Jihad would discuss the release of other hostages if the United Nations is able to “secure the release of our freedom fighters from prisons in occupied Palestine and Europe.”