Middle East

By Bruce W. Nelan

It is astonishing how many ways the Middle East's antagonists can find to thwart peace. Lately, the preferred method has been to dither. Now Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has stepped in with a proposal to goose the main parties into conversation, only to find even those modest efforts mired in debate. After an inconclusive round robin of talks in Cairo, Washington and New York, Mubarak went home warning -- not for the first time -- that a "golden opportunity" was about to be missed.

All he was trying to do was "get the wheel moving," Mubarak said, when he drew up a ten-point plan for opening a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians on the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Mubarak's ideas, explained Secretary of State James Baker, are not competing with but are "complementary" to the peace proposal Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir put forward last May, which calls for elections in the occupied territories. "We don't think we'll get to peace until we have Palestinians and Israelis speaking to each other," said Baker.

The immediate question at the center of this public diplomacy was whether the Israelis would accept Mubarak's invitation to a conference in Cairo to get the peace process going. Shamir's election plan was limited to begin with, then hedged with such stiff conditions -- excluding Arabs in East Jerusalem from the vote, for example -- that it made no headway with the Palestinians. Many in Israel were just as glad.

Mubarak in effect redrafted the plan to take the sharper edges off both sides' objections. The U.S. backed the idea, and the P.L.O. did not torpedo it. While the Palestinian leadership has little faith that the plan will work, it does not want to bear responsibility for a failure. Faced with following through on its own official policy, the Israeli government fell to arguing with itself. Labor embraced Mubarak's proposal, while Shamir's Likud opposed large chunks of the plan. Two days of hot debate in the twelve-member Inner Cabinet last week produced a tie vote: de facto rejection of the plan.

Much of the debate has been sidetracked by the old question of who will represent the Palestinians. At a meeting with President George Bush in Washington last week, Mubarak proposed a dozen Palestinians who could take part in a conference in Cairo, including a few who had been expelled from the West Bank. P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat reportedly indicated that he would go along with Mubarak's suggestion.

The Israelis protested strongly that this implied participation by the P.L.O. Although any Palestinian would be risking his life if he dared serve on such a delegation without at least tacit P.L.O. approval, Israel continues to insist that it will never agree to contacts with "terrorist organizations." "It is now clear to us that this is to be a Palestinian delegation appointed by the P.L.O.," said Yossi Ben-Aharon, director of the Prime Minister's office.

Likud found plenty of other objections to Mubarak's proposals, which include a halt to all new settlements in the West Bank and Israel's return of some of the occupied territories in a final peace settlement. But Mubarak did not insist on these points as preconditions for the Cairo talks. Said an Egyptian diplomat: "If the Israelis do not want to accept all the ideas, they can sit down and discuss what would be acceptable." But Likud sees those points as obstacles nonetheless since Shamir's bloc violently opposes them.

The Labor Party, junior partner in Jerusalem's coalition Cabinet, is willing to accept Mubarak's invitation but is so far unwilling to break up the government over the issue. That could force another election a year after the last one, in which Labor wound up second. Though Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin has emerged as Labor's chief enthusiast for peace talks, he said in an interview last week that he would "try my best" to keep the coalition together. The Israelis are unlikely to accept any similar initiatives as long as the politicians prefer to maintain unity at any price.

Many Middle East experts in the Department of State believe that only heavy pressure from the U.S. could push Israel into saying yes to Mubarak. But that / is not Bush's way. Baker has publicly ruled out arm twisting. Whatever Israel's decision, it will not "affect the fundamental U.S.-Israeli relationship," the Secretary of State said last week. Too much pressure would only alienate Shamir, he argues, and he does not want Labor to split the coalition in Jerusalem, because new elections would stall the peace process even more. But at this point, the Bush Administration's policy seems only to encourage more dithering. In calling for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but not to the point of disrupting the Israeli government, that policy could prove to be nothing more than a formula for delaying the peace process.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira/Washington and William Dowell/Cairo