News Analysis: Weizman Offer to Meet Arafat Presses Netanyahu to Do Same

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat in the coming weeks, he will have been shamed into doing so by President Ezer Weizman.

Since Netanyahu formed his government in June, he has met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo and Jordan’s King Hussein in Amman, but he has pointedly avoided meeting with Israel’s Palestinian peace partner, saying that he would consider sitting down with Arafat only if it was deemed necessary for national security.

But the prime minister may no longer be able to avoid a meeting after Sunday’s sudden — indeed unprecedented — intervention by Weizman.

Concerned that the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the snubbing of Arafat could undermine agreements already made, Weizman immediately responded affirmatively to a written request by Arafat for a meeting.

Weizman’s move came days after former Premier Shimon Peres met with Arafat in Gaza to discuss the status of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Netanyahu sharply criticized Peres last week, accusing the Labor Party leader of interfering in the peace process.

However, after the president’s intervention, aides to the prime minister said a Netanyahu-Arafat meeting is now likely to take place.

Although they would not say when it would be held, there was speculation here that the two might meet before Netanyahu’s scheduled visit to the United States next month, just before Rosh Hashanah.

At the same time, aides to Weizman insisted that if a Netanyahu-Arafat meeting does not take place soon, the president would go ahead with his own plans to host Arafat at his private home in Caesarea.

Weizman’s prodding comes amid growing international concern about the stalled Israeli-Palestinian talks.

Mubarak has threatened to cancel a regional economic summit scheduled for November in Cairo if there is no progress with the Palestinians. Israel, which has seen its ties to the Arab world expand since the self-rule accords were signed with the Palestinians in 1993. has a vested interest in the conference, the third in a series.

Among Palestinians, there is growing anxiety as they await decisions by the Netanyahu government regarding the long-delayed redeployment of Israeli troops from most of Hebron and the resumption of the final-status talks, which will address settlements, Jerusalem and Palestinian statehood.

While not yet making a final decision on Hebron, Netanyahu has indicated that the redeployment would be much less generous than the terms agreed to under the previous Peres government.

Further, Netanyahu has shown no willingness to carry out another provision of the Interim Agreement — three more Israel Defense Force redeployments set to begin in September that would turn over additional West Bank territory to the Palestinians.

In the eyes of Palestinians, Arafat, who regularly met with Israel’s top leaders, including Peres and his predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, is being treated with contempt by Netanyahu.

But despite his personal antipathy toward Arafat, Netanyahu may not be able to shrug off the president’s initiative, given the widespread approval Weizman’s intercession received, even within the premier’s own Likud ranks.

Likud Knesset member Gideon Ezra, a former deputy head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, urged Netanyahu to stop delaying and meet with Arafat immediately.

Ezra was hopeful that a Netanyahu-Arafat meeting would generate a dynamic of its own that would bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table.

By finally meeting with Arafat, Netanyahu would be lifting a taboo that he has carried for years.

But given the discord between Netanyahu and Arafat, there are attendant risks to forcing a summit. Political observers here pointed out this week that even if the long-awaited meeting eventually does take place, it may result in even deeper friction between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority if their talks only confirm the growing divide between the two sides.

Weizman’s dramatic intervention burst upon an Israeli public going back to work Sunday morning after a late summer weekend.

The largest circulation newspaper, Yediot Achronot, reported that Arafat, in a letter to Weizman, had voiced his concerns about the peace process and had asked to see him.

Weizman, the paper added, proposed inviting the Palestinian leader to his seaside vilia at Caesarea, and had informed Netanyahu accordingly.

Within hours of the paper hitting the streets, Netanyahu was at the president’s official residence in Jerusalem and after more than an hour, the two men emerged to face a battery of reporters.

Plainly, they were determined to maintain a cordial facade. “We just like one another,” Netanyahu declared, with Weizman nodding his agreement.

But the prime minister became visibly stiffer as the president recounted in detail his correspondence with Arafat and explained why he was prepared to host him in Caesarea.

“As the first Palestinian leader in 100 years of conflict who has achieved important political success, as our neighbor who is alongside us and amongst us,” Arafat’s request for a meeting should be honored, Weizman said.

Such a meeting would be coordinated, of course, with the prime minister and the government, the president added. After all, there were logistical arrangements, such as Arafat’s helicopter route, that require official authorization.

Weizman denied that he had effectively presented the prime minister with an ultimatum.

Threatening to meet with Arafat if Netanyahu continued to refuse to do so would have been “childish,” Weizman said.

Nonetheless, the president could not dispel the impression that in essence he was pressuring the prime minister.

Netanyahu, for his part, reiterated his formula that he would meet with Arafat if the national interest required it.

Privately, government sources maintained that a series of high-level meetings between Israeli and Palestinian policy-makers was in fact under way.

Foreign Minister David Levy met with Arafat on July 23, and the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, Dore Gold, has been meeting frequently with Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu-Mazen.

And last week, Netanyahu appointed former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Sharon to head up the Israeli negotiations with the Palestinians. The premier indicated that those talks would resume shortly, but did not give a date.

These meetings would have naturally led, in time, to a Netanyahu-Arafat summit, according to the government sources.

But without the meeting the friction between Israel and the Palestinian Authority escalated, prompting Weizman to take his unorthodox action.

In Israel, the president is largely a ceremonial figure with no political role. His influence on politics, if he exerts any, derives from his own personality and from the moral prestige of his position as the head of state.

In Weizman’s case, his intervention, designed to speed up the peace process, drew ironic comments from the left, alongside the broad support it generated throughout the political community. Political figures in the Labor and Meretz parties believe that Weizman’s response to the wave of suicide-bomb terror attacks in February and March was a contributing factor to Peres’ defeat in the May election.

Weizman, mirroring widespread popular feeling after the bus bombings, demanded that the Labor-led government “slow down” the peace process in the wake of the terror wave. “Things cannot go on as though nothing has happened,” the president said.

He was accused at the time by the left of unconventional interference in policy-making.

This week, however, there was no such accusation from the right. In fact, voices within the Likud explicitly welcomed Weizman’s effort to force a meeting between Arafat and Netanyahu.

“There is no reason to delay,” said Likud Knesset member Meir Sheetrit. “We promised the voters a peace process,” he said. “Let’s get on with it.”