Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s policies but is willing nonetheless to meet with him if it is “certain that the meeting would have concrete results.”
He said he would be willing to go to Israel for the meeting.
Mubarak held a series of high-level discussions in Rome last week on the first leg of a tour which took him to Luxembourg and France over the weekend. He also was to visit Turkey, Syria and Libya.
The Egyptian president left on his trip to discuss Middle East peace prospects on May 16, the day U.S. Secretary of State James Baker ended his latest round of talks in Jerusalem.
Mubarak stressed that Baker’s mission had his fullest support. But he said he has seen no signs from Israel that would raise hopes for a peace settlement.
After meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Mubarak called Shamir’s policies “unrealistic” and said Israel should accept the Palestine Liberation Organization as a negotiating partner.
In Luxembourg on Friday, Mubarak said he did not think Baker’s mission had been a failure. “The problem of the Middle East is so complicated that it will not be solved in one or two trips,” he said.
Mubarak met with the foreign minister of Luxembourg, Jacques Poos, who currently holds the rotating chairmanship of the European Community’s Council of Ministers.
Poos spoke last Thursday at the monthly session of the European Parliament, the E.C.’s legislative body, in Strasbourg, France. He called on Israel for concessions on the issues of Palestinian representation at peace talks and the participation of the United Nations and the E.C. in them.
He said Shamir’s recent statements ruling out territorial concessions “are not useful or opportune.”
“The presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization as such is not on the agenda for the moment, but rejecting a PLO-affiliated Palestinian amounts to a refusal of dialogue,” Poos said.
(JTA correspondent Yossi Lempkowicz in Brussels contributed to this report.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
