Searching for a Second-Stage Deal

"The Arabs cannot make war without the Egyptians, and they cannot make peace without the Palestinians."

That assessment, by a longtime confidant of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's, seemed to describe the complex problem facing U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger last week as he stepped up the tempo of his shuttle diplomacy in quest of a second-stage disengagement agreement.

Egypt is reluctant to go to war again with Israel over the Sinai. Kissinger last week moved from earlier exploratory talks on "ideas and elements" to the more difficult matter of concrete proposals. His task was to draw up guarantees that both Cairo and Jerusalem could live with. His negotiations were complicated by the fact that not only the Palestine Liberation Organization but Syria as well wanted a piece of the peace. Kissinger was reluctant to have them too much involved. Sadat, on the other hand, had to try to get some promise of movement toward disengagement on the Golan Heights and a resolution of the future of the West Bank. Otherwise, the Egyptian President would be in trouble with other Arab powers for selfishly trying to go it alone.

Significant Switch. Neither Kissinger nor the Israelis are willing to deal at this point with the P.L.O., particularly in the wake of the Fatah terrorist attack on Tel Aviv's Savoy Hotel two weeks ago (TIME, March 17). That raid, as P.L.O. spokesmen made clear, was designed to discredit the Secretary's peace-keeping mission. Last week Syrian President Hafez Assad tried to pull the Palestinians into the negotiations. Assad, who has switched significantly from opposing second-stage talks between Israel and Egypt to demanding a role in them for Syria, suddenly proposed a joint Syrian-Palestinian military command that would continue to fight for the recovery of Palestinian land from Israel. His proposal was obviously designed to put pressure on Sadat and keep him part of a united Arab confrontation front. The move appeared to take even some Palestinians by surprise.

In spite of such difficulties, Kissinger remained optimistic about the outcome of his tenth round of personalized Middle East negotiations. "My view is that we are making progress slowly," he told U.S. newsmen as he flew from Aswan to Jerusalem at week's end. He appeared perceptibly relaxed as his Air Force jet settled into a cross-weave routine of flights between Aswan, Tel Aviv and Damascus (see box following page). At midweek he was confident enough about the pace of discussions to undertake a side trip to Ankara, where he discussed the Cyprus situation with Turkish leaders. They displayed a greater willingness to discuss the future of the divided island with the government of Greece, even though the Turks remain angry about a congressionally imposed cutoff of U.S. military aid.

One reason for Kissinger's optimism was that both Israel and Egypt continued to keep secret the possible shape of a second-stage agreement involving the Sinai. That meant both were bargaining in earnest. Kissinger was seeking to reconcile Egypt's demand for the recovery of occupied land with Israel's insistence on some form of nonbelligerency guarantee. "We have just entered the fog," Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin told members of his government who had not sat in on the latest round of negotiations with Kissinger. Sadat, meanwhile, told a group of Egyptian editors and Cabinet ministers that there was at most a 20% chance that the current talks would fail--implying that the odds were 4 to 1 they would succeed.

Privately, both sides seemed to be backing down from intransigent positions they had earlier assumed in public, largely for bargaining purposes. The Israelis were talking for the first time about settling for "elements of nonbelligerency," which was an easing of their previous insistence on a nonbelligerency pact, period. Sadat, who had insisted that there must be Israeli movement toward peacemaking on all three fronts --Sinai, the Golan Heights and the West Bank--amended that to a softer "gesture of peace on three fronts." The timing of these concessions appeared to be as critical as the concessions themselves.

Israeli spokesmen also revived the so-called 30/50 plan that the Israeli government first proposed last December. Under that plan, the concessions on either side could be considerably lessened: Israel would pull back on a line 30 to 50 kilometers from its present first-stage disengagement positions, but would retain the Mitla and Gidi passes and the Abu Rudeis oil fields that Sadat badly wants. Egypt, in return, would give a very limited commitment of nonbelligerence. The revival of the 30/50 plan appeared to be a last-ditch contingency proposal that would be used to salvage the negotiations if it finally appeared that nothing more could be gained by shuttle diplomacy.

Israel obviously hoped that Kissinger could negotiate much more than that minimum, including a larger buffer zone between forces, thinning out of troops on either side and a more lasting and more effective United Nations observer force in the Sinai. The contingency planning reflected Israeli worries that Kissinger may have lost some of his magic since the first round of disengagement talks last year. The latest popularity poll on the Secretary by the newspaper Ha'aretz shows that only 30% of Israelis think favorably of his approach; last June his popularity rating stood at 63.8%.

There is some disillusionment on the Arab side as well. Visiting Damascus, Kissinger was firmly lectured by Assad, who charged that the U.S. was an undependable friend who had deserted South Viet Nam, Cambodia and Turkey and might one day desert tiny Israel too. For that reason, Assad insisted, Sadat was a fool to trust Washington too much. Kissinger's answer was that the U.S. does indeed stand by its friends and allies.

Syrian Pitfall. Assad's proposal for setting up a joint command with the Palestinians was received politely by P.L.O. Leader Yasser Arafat. "We are together on the road of struggle," Arafat cabled Assad. Privately, however, some P.L.O. leaders were worried about what one Egyptian diplomat last week termed "the Syrian pitfall." That is, the Palestinians risk the loss of sympathy and support from other Arab states who might become nervous if the P.L.O. aligned itself too closely with Damascus. The more radical states would be particularly peeved; a case in point is Iraq, whose truculent Baath leaders are making up with imperial Iran (see story page 37) but still have little use for Assad, whom they consider too mild a socialist.

Moderate states like Egypt, on the other hand, would not be in favor of a Syrian-P.L.O. alliance either. Sadat wants to woo Arafat away from Syria and the Soviets, whose roving Middle East envoy, Vladimir Vinogradov, was also in the region last week. He conferred with Jordanian officials in an ostentatious effort to blunt the Kissinger negotiations.

The Secretary has shuttled the Middle East long enough to read the moods and manners of the people he is dealing with. The Russians, despite Vinogradov's visit, are still willing, for the time being, to let the Kissinger shuttle function. Assad appears to follow a by now familiar technique: resistance to moderate negotiating proposals until the climax of discussions, at which point he suddenly becomes flexible and realistic. Meanwhile, the more somber Sadat appears, the more thoughtful he becomes. Visiting the Egyptian President's bougainvillaea-draped winter residence at Aswan last week, TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn found Sadat deep in discussion with military and diplomatic advisers and almost oblivious to other activity around him. The prognosis for Kissinger, all in all, still appeared to be good.

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