A team of U.S. diplomats has ended a weeklong mission in Israel and Jordan, apparently without resolving the problem of who will represent the Palestinians in peace negotiations with Israel.
Failure to resolve this issue could scuttle U.S.-Soviet plans to convene a Middle East peace conference in October.
Israel has made its participation in the conference conditional on resolving the issue of Palestinian representation. It is insisting that the Palestine Liberation Organization play no part in selecting the delegation and that it include only residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, not East Jerusalem.
Jordan has also left its participation in the peace conference in doubt, saying that it will refuse to serve as a substitute for Palestinian negotiators.
Jordanian Prime Minister Taher al-Masri said in a television interview Monday that his country has not yet made up its mind about what course of action to take if an agreement cannot be reached on Palestinian representation.
The team of U.S. diplomats included Daniel Kurtzer, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs; Aaron Miller, a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff; and Edmund Hull of the National Security Council.
They arrived here Aug. 6 to draft a memorandum of understanding on the composition of the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation that would negotiate directly with Israel.
‘NO MEMORANDUM YET’
But according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the team encountered obstacles in drafting the memorandum.
The U.S. diplomats conferred here last week with both Israeli officials and Palestinian representatives, and then went to Amman for discussions with Jordanian officials.
A Jordanian official quoted by Ha’aretz said after the meetings in Amman, “There is no memorandum yet, but eventually there will be. There are different disagreements, but we are discussing them.”
The Americans returned here Monday from Amman and met again that night with the Israeli team. No progress was made on the issue of Palestinian representation, Ha’aretz reported.
The U.S. team did not hold another meeting with Palestinian representatives here before returning to Washington.
Ha’aretz speculated that after conferring in Washington with Secretary of State James Baker, the U.S. team would return here to continue its talks. It said Baker would also likely return to the region sometime next month.
In Washington, the State Department confirmed Tuesday that the U.S. team was returning from the region after holding “expert-level” discussions in Israel and Jordan. But it would not say whether progress was made on resolving the issue of Palestinian representation.
Meanwhile, influential Palestinians in the administered territories are insisting that the PLO select the list of participants in the peace talks, and they say the PLO’s conditions for the talks must be met.
The PLO has not yet agreed to Palestinian participation in the peace conference or named any negotiators, apparently to avoid an all-out confrontation with Israel.
PROPOSED LISTS CIRCULATING
In the meantime, observers in the Arab media and street-corner pundits are busy composing various combinations of lists.
The latest list making the rounds would include Ziad Abu-Ziad, a moderate journalist; Mustafa Natshe, former mayor of Hebron; Ghassan Shaka, a Nablus businessman; and a number of lesser-known figures.
Significantly, the list does not mention Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi, two key Palestinians who have been negotiating with Baker.
The omission is an apparent attempt to overcome Israel’s insistence on not talking to any representatives of East Jerusalem, which Israel regards as part and parcel of the state. Husseini lives in East Jerusalem.
Husseini said this week that all talk about the Palestinian delegation is much too early. He said the names would not be published until the PLO’s assembly, the Palestine National Council, meets to discuss the peace process next month.
(JTA correspondent David Friedman in Washington contributed to this report.)
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