Middle East: What Are These Two Up To?

By Bruce W. Nelan

When the gulf war ended in March, Washington had high hopes that the allied victory would provide the momentum for Arabs and Israelis to seek a broader peace. But that expectation quickly curdled into disappointment as George Bush discovered both sides still clung to conditions that precluded talks. Bush sounded less than confident last spring, when he dispatched Secretary of State James Baker to Israel and its Arab neighbors on a round of exploratory diplomacy. "It's the Baker plan," the President joked. "If it works, we'll call it the Bush plan."

Both of them, in fact, applied steady pressure and persuasion, and last week Israel, the final holdout, seemed closer than ever to agreeing to a regional peace conference. Whether the initiative is named for Bush or Baker hardly matters. If it succeeds, it will be because it is American by birth. The U.S. is the world's only fully functioning superpower and the only likely source of rewards for good international behavior. So the states of the region must calculate not only what it could cost them to say no to Washington but also how it might profit them to say yes.

Baker arrived in Israel again last week after a visit to Syria, where he picked up President Hafez Assad's formal acceptance of Washington's proposal for a conference. Jordan and Lebanon had also quickly fallen into line. Egypt was on board from the start, and Saudi Arabia and the gulf states had promised to join talks on regional problems such as water supplies and arms control.

The pressure is now on Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. He balked at U.S. efforts early last year, but since then the Arabs have come a long way toward meeting Israeli preconditions. The conference would be sponsored not by the United Nations but by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It would convene once, then break up into four groups for direct negotiations among Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states.

"For 43 years," Baker said in Jerusalem, "Israel has sought direct negotiations with its neighbors, and it has been right to do so. Now there is a real opportunity to get to those face-to-face negotiations." He said he had not given Shamir a deadline for his response but hoped to get an answer before this week's U.S.-Soviet summit in Moscow. Bush and President Mikhail Gorbachev were thinking of issuing invitations from the summit to an October peace conference.

In his talks with Baker, Shamir raised the question of who would represent the Palestinians at the conference, the same issue that led to the fall of the Israeli government of national unity in March 1990, and threw the Labor Party into opposition. Israel adamantly refuses to sit down with Palestinians from East Jerusalem for fear of signaling that the area, won in the 1967 war and now annexed to Jewish West Jerusalem, is open to negotiation.

But Shamir also said publicly that Syria's agreement to talk has altered the Middle East equation. "For the first time," he said, "the President of Syria is ready to negotiate with Israel." At a meeting with visiting American district attorneys, Shamir sounded even more upbeat: "As the situation stands now, I think that we are approaching the beginning of negotiations."

INSIDE SHAMIR'S MIND

The usually inflexible Shamir faces a decision that is existential as well as strategic. He cannot put Israel, the refuge of the Jewish people, in danger by compromising its security. Neither can he pass up a real opportunity to create a peace that could enhance the nation's safety. He would like to get far enough into negotiations to examine his prospects but also leave himself a way out if pressures get too heavy.

In the past, Shamir had no appetite for talks. He was determined not to give up "one square inch" of occupied territory in return for peace with the Arabs. He even opposed the 1978 Camp David settlement with Egypt. Now, says Ehud Olmert, director of the government press office, the Prime Minister can take a chance. "Shamir has no problem," Olmert says. "We're not talking < about giving up Jewish settlements on the West Bank. We're not talking about giving up Jerusalem."

Israel can score some gains simply by going to the table. Most important would be its irrevocable recognition by the Arabs as a legitimate actor in the affairs of the Middle East. To carry out its role as cosponsor, the U.S.S.R. would also have to restore diplomatic relations with Israel. Over and above those considerations, Israel would strengthen rather than damage its alliance with the U.S., where impatience with its obstructionism has often run high. Israel's request for a $10 billion loan guarantee to resettle immigrants from the Soviet Union and Ethiopia would be certain to sail through Congress.

The Arabs have let Shamir arrange the chairs at the conference to suit himself. All sides have accepted the idea that the peace process will move in stages, with the first one intended to provide Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza with local self-government, not an independent state. The Palestine Liberation Organization is ruled out of the talks, and, if Shamir has his way, overt representatives of East Jerusalem will be too. The peace conference will serve only to start bilateral talks and will have no authority to make decisions.

For its part, Israel is not required by Bush's proposal to agree to trade any territory for peace or to halt its construction of new settlements on the West Bank. "I don't believe in territorial compromise," Shamir insisted last week. Baker delivered an Arab offer to suspend the 43-year economic boycott of Israel in return for putting the settlements on hold. Jerusalem rejected it.

Shamir's credo is that Arabs hate Israelis until proved otherwise. This belief impels him to seek concrete evidence of Syria's sincerity, something he can obtain only by moving to the peace table. His instinct is to delay, but he fears that he might squander the best chance Israel has seen to make peace. "We must start negotiations," Shamir said Friday, "and we want to start them now."

INSIDE ASSAD'S MIND

Syria's President was the linchpin for the peace process and the toughest Arab leader for Washington to persuade. He is also, says William Quandt of the Brookings Institution, "a great realist." When the cold war ended and the Soviet Union fell into disarray, Assad could no longer count on modern weapons and economic support from Moscow, and his dreams of achieving strategic parity with Israel faded.

( During the gulf war, Assad moved closer to Washington and the moderate Arabs by joining the alliance against Iraq. For his efforts, he received major subsidies from Saudi Arabia -- at least $2.5 billion so far -- and a nod of acceptance from the U.S. as he completed his domination of Lebanon and disarmed the rival militias. Whatever threat Lebanon's civil war might have posed to Syrian hegemony is now gone.

Assad can see that he has little or no chance of forcibly taking back the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war. The last slight hope for Soviet support for another war was snuffed out by a personal message Assad received from Gorbachev early in July. Its proposals, almost identical with those Bush had made, strongly reinforced U.S. arguments. Soviet officials delicately avoid calling it pressure, but one explains, "Gorbachev just sent a letter expressing our feeling that cooperation with the U.S. would be constructive and important."

The clincher in Assad's decision to sit down with Israel may have been the way Bush explained the U.S. role. First get to the peace conference, said Bush; give Shamir his procedural points. But once negotiations begin, the U.S. and the Soviets are committed to follow through to a comprehensive settlement. Washington's foundations for the settlement, Bush reiterated, are Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which call on Israel to trade land it has occupied since 1967 for security guarantees from the Arab states. In the U.S. view, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem are all negotiable.

Assad undoubtedly realized that he was playing into Israel's hands by hanging back. Shamir had no need to say yes, and Washington had no leverage on Israel's decision until Syria agreed to the conference. Now Assad has focused the pressure on Israel.

As soon as this week's summit winds up in Moscow, Baker will fly back to Jerusalem to finesse the last Israeli objections and preconditions. Most Middle East experts believe that Shamir will acquiesce and that the regional conference will convene in a few months. That would be a step toward the peace process but nothing close to an overall solution. Once the bilateral negotiations begin, Israel may go along with autonomy for Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. But Shamir vows to oppose any territorial concessions, offering only what he calls "peace for peace."

That stance will bring Israel under intense pressure from its negotiating partners, the conference co-sponsors and world opinion. The question then would be whether the Israelis can stonewall indefinitely or will be forced to consider such options as demilitarizing the Golan Heights and allowing international supervision in parts of Jerusalem.

Rethinking of that sort has no place in Shamir's strategy, so he might already be pondering how to derail the negotiations if pressure to make concessions becomes overwhelming. One way for him to bail out would be to arrange for several hard-liners to resign from his governing coalition, causing its collapse. That would produce an Israeli election just as the U.S. goes into its own presidential year, when American politicians are even less eager than usual to try to coerce Israel.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo, Christopher Ogden with Baker and Robert Slater/Jerusalem