As U.S. Secretary of State James Baker hopped from one Middle East capital to another this week, senior Israeli officials braced for a new onslaught of pressure from the United States to make further concessions on proposed peace talks with the Arabs.
Baker was due Friday to return to Israel, where his current Middle East mission began a week earlier.
Concerned as Israeli leaders were that he would arrive with new demands, they could take comfort from the fact that if the diplomatic initiative failed, Israel alone would not be blamed.
For if Israel was sticking this week to its conditions for participating in some sort of regional peace conference, the Arab states and the Palestinians were showing no more flexibility.
In what appeared to be a last-ditch attempt to push the diplomatic process forward, Baker flew to the Soviet Union on Wednesday to try to entice his Kremlin counterpart, Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, to get involved in his Middle East initiative.
The two leaders were to meet Thursday in the Caucasus resort town of Kislovodsk.
In Baker’s scenario, the two superpowers are cast as the joint sponsors of the regional peace conference. He therefore thought the Soviets should begin to exercise their still considerable influence in the Arab world while the United States tried to exert its influence on Israel.
Bessmertnykh is known to be planning his own Middle East mission soon, a fact that prompted speculation he might visit Jerusalem, despite the awkward lack of full Soviet diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.
Baker, meanwhile, let Israel know that he considers the rash of settlement building by Jewish militants in the West Bank to be hampering his efforts to convince the Arab states to meet Israel at the peace table.
“We were very disappointed to learn this morning that there is yet another new settlement established in the occupied territories,” the secretary said Wednesday at a news conference before leaving Damascus.
“That points up vividly that it is easier to obstruct peace than to promote it,” he said.
He was referring to Talmon B, an encampment of mobile homes set up Tuesday by Gush Emunim activists, who contended their move was merely the extension of the existing settlement of Talmon, some two miles away.
SOME FLEXIBILITY ON CONFERENCE
Last week, two days before Baker arrived in Israel at the start of his current mission, Gush Emunim activists established a settlement called Revava.
The two moves may well have set back Baker’s efforts to organize a regional conference.
According to an unconfirmed report, Saudi Arabia had been ready to participate in such a conference, but changed its mind after Revava was set up, to avoid the acute embarrassment it would suffer if the Israelis put up more settlements while negotiations were under way.
Shamir and some of his top ministers may be dismayed by the timing of the latest settlement activity, but coalition polities and ideology prevent them from cracking down on the settlement movement activists.
Both Likud hard-liners and Shamir’s coalition partners on the right have been suspicious of Baker’s peace efforts from the start.
The prime minister consequently has spent much of his time between Baker’s visits assuring them that he will never waver on such basic Likud policies as no further territorial concessions for peace, no freeze on settlements and no inclusion of East Jerusalem Arabs on a Palestinian negotiating team.
But there were hints this week that Shamir might agree to a peace conference that was somewhat more than a brief ceremonial prologue to separate bilateral talks Israel would have with the Arab states and the Palestinians.
Israel might agree to relax its insistence that the conference should adjourn as soon as direct talks get under way.
Shamir also was said to be ready to agree to some sort of European role in the conference, though Jerusalem initially opposed this idea.
Baker had been pressing for this at the behest of America’s European allies and seemed to be making headway until French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas had a meeting Tuesday in Libya with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat.
Israeli hard-liners seized on that as evidence of European perfidy and basic hostility toward Israel.
A MESSAGE FROM MUBARAK
Baker, hoping to head off just such a reaction, cabled Shamir and Foreign Minister David Levy on Wednesday, stressing his own outrage at the meeting.
But the damage, in terms of Israel’s consent to a European role, may already have been done.
Baker’s problems lie not only in Jerusalem. His extensive talks Tuesday with Syrian President Hafez Assad apparently yielded nothing. Damascus still insists on a full-fledged international peace conference under U.N. auspices, which Israel totally rejects.
The only promising news came from Egypt and Jordan, which indicated they are amenable to any form of negotiations as long as the peace process moves forward.
Israel Radio reported Wednesday that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had sent a message to Shamir on Monday, urging Israel to take more “practical” steps toward peace. The message was in response to an earlier one Shamir had sent to Mubarak.
There seemed to be new flexibility on the part of at least some local Palestinian leaders.
Several dozen Palestinian activists met in an East Jerusalem theater Tuesday, without interference from the Israelis, to be briefed on the situation by Radwan Abu-Ayyash, chairman of the Palestinian Journalists Association, who was released last week from five months of administrative detention.
Urging Palestinians not to miss a historic opportunity, Abu-Ayyash recommended taking part in the political process, regardless of its form.
“If a regional conference would bring us to an independent state, under the leadership of the PLO, then I am for a regional conference,” he said.
His comments were in sharp contrast with those of Arafat, who, at his meeting with Dumas, insisted on an international conference.
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.
