Palestinians Insist on Negotiating with Israel As Separate Delegation

On the eve of the second round of bilateral Middle East peace talks, a new stumbling block appeared, as Palestinians insisted on negotiating with Israel separately from Jordan.

In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir warned Monday that the talks could be derailed if the Palestinians refuse to negotiate as part of a joint delegation with Jordan.

It is “inconceivable” the Palestinians would maintain this position, since agreements reached prior to the peace conference in Madrid are “entirely clear,” Shamir said after briefing the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

“Israel is prepared to negotiate with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation,” he said.

Here in Washington, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler seemed to agree with Shamir. She said that “under the terms of reference” for the talks, the Palestinians and Jordanians are to negotiate with Israel as part of a joint delegation.

She said the State Department has made available one room for these talks. Separate rooms also will be available for the negotiations Israel is to conduct separately with Syria and Lebanon.

There are also separate entrances at the State Department for the delegations to the three sets of negotiations, which were due to begin at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

But Tutwiler said the United States would have no objections if Israel, the Palestinians and Jordan agreed among themselves to split up the talks.

SOVIETS STILL A CO-SPONSOR?

There was one report that Elyakim Rubinstein, head of the Israeli delegation for the talks with the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, had suggested that the joint delegation meet with Israel for a short procedural session.

The delegates would then split up into two subcommittees, one dealing with Palestinian autonomy and the other Israeli-Jordanian bilateral issues.

One suggestion offered in order to please both sides would have one Palestinian sit with the Jordanian delegation and a Jordanian sit with the Palestinian delegation. This would enable Israel to maintain that the joint delegation continued to exist, while the Palestinians could point to a separate delegation.

But one Israeli spokesman suggested Monday that the Palestinians were raising the issue as a last chance to score public relations points before the talks actually got under way.

In his Knesset testimony, Shamir said that the Israeli negotiators were empowered to deal not only with procedural matters but also other matters as they arose. This was a denial of reports that the negotiators could only deal with Israel’s demands that the next stage in the talks be held in the Middle East.

The negotiators could advance the many ideas Israel had prepared prior to the talks, Shamir said.

Meanwhile, Tutwiler said the Bush administration is continuing to consider the Soviet Union an active co-sponsor for the Middle East negotiators, despite the rapid changes in that country, including the apparent disintegration of the central authority.

The Soviets “have been extremely helpful” over the last eight months in bringing about the peace talks, she said.

Tutwiler also indicated that despite the decision of Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia to create a Commonwealth of Independent States, the Bush administration believes the third stage of the peace process, a multilateral conference on regional issues, will open, as scheduled, in Moscow on Jan. 28.

Tutwiler said the chief U.S. concern with the creation of the commonwealth is that the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapon remain under a single unified control. The United States also wants to ensure that nuclear technology will not be exported to countries like Iraq and Libya, she said.

(JTA correspondent David Landau in Jerusalem contributed to this report.)