Middle East So Much for National Unity

For 32 months it has been billed as a national unity coalition, but the two wings of the Jerusalem government last week displayed little evidence of anything approaching harmony. "Perverse and criminal!" cried Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir at Foreign Minister Shimon Peres' proposal to convene an international peace conference in the region. Peres, the leader of the Labor Party, retaliated by accusing his coalition partner of "character assassination."

Twice last week the ten-member Israeli inner Cabinet met to debate the issue, and twice the sessions ended in stalemate. Peres threatened to break up the coalition and call new elections if the inner Cabinet failed to support him on the peace proposal. But by midweek he lacked a handful of the 61 votes in the 120-member Knesset needed to bring about early elections. With Labor short of sufficient support, party officials feared that Likud, with the help of some small religious parties, would then be able to hang on until November 1988. Before leaving for the U.S. to consult with Secretary of State George Shultz, Peres was forced to announce that for the moment Labor would remain in the troubled government. But the dispute continued on another front: the Foreign Ministry refused to transmit to its embassies a Shamir message saying that the peace plan was dead.

Peres' proposal, which has been endorsed by Jordan's King Hussein and the Reagan Administration, has been at least two years in the making. It calls for an international conference whose participants would include the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China) as well as Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. After a formal opening, the conference would break up into small, bilateral meetings, with Israeli representatives meeting separately with Syrian, Jordanian and joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegations. The plan would limit the role of the Soviet Union and would probably rule out the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization unless the P.L.O. agreed at long last to renounce violence and recognize Israel's right to exist.

So far, the crucial question of exchanging occupied lands for peace lies well in the future. But Peres, who has long believed that Israel should be prepared to trade some of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for a settlement, thinks the time is ripe to enter into negotiations. He also knows that Labor now enjoys a strong lead over Likud in public opinion polls. Shamir, for his part, is determined to hang on to every square inch of the territories Israel has occupied since 1967, even though their 1.46 million residents are 96% Palestinian. He refuses to consider negotiations with the Soviets or indirect dealings with the P.L.O. or Arab governments. And he is infuriated that Peres may be trying to exploit the issue in order to force him out of office before his term expires next year. Since Peres and Shamir seem equally angry and determined, prospects for compromise are not bright.