Middle East Four Steps to Peace

By Jill Smolowe

If everything goes according to plan, peace in the Middle East is just four steps away. First, Secretary of State James Baker will meet in Washington with the Egyptian and Israeli foreign ministers to select a Palestinian delegation. That group, in turn, will travel to Cairo, where Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will be host for preliminary talks in which the Palestinians and an Israeli delegation will set down the ground rules for elections in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. They will use as their framework a proposal put forward ten months ago by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Balloting will then be held in the occupied territories to elect representatives to negotiate a period of limited self-rule. Within five years, those representatives will begin negotiations on the final status of the disputed territories.

Before any of this can happen, however, Israel must agree to attend the Washington conference. And that is where the peace process idled last week, when Shamir balked at Baker's proposal that the delegation to the Cairo talks include both a Palestinian who maintains an office or a second residence in East Jerusalem and a Palestinian deported from the territories. Shamir's intransigence brought his Likud Party into direct conflict with the other major member of his coalition government, the Labor Party, which has embraced Baker's conditions. The impasse threatens to derail both the peace process and the 15-month-old national unity government.

The disagreement about talking about talks also threatens to further strain tensions between Jerusalem and Washington. In recent weeks the Bush Administration has made known its impatience with Shamir's delaying tactics. On March 1, Baker told a House subcommittee, "We've really done pretty much all we can do . . . we are awaiting a response from the Israeli government." In his testimony, Baker riled Israelis by saying that he was "satisfied" the Palestine Liberation Organization was adhering to its commitment not to employ terrorism against Israel, that he favors cuts in aid to Israel and that Israel must agree to halt all settlement activity in the occupied territories before the U.S. would approve $400 million in loan guarantees for housing Soviet Jewish immigrants. Two days later, President Bush raised the fever in Jerusalem by stating that he opposes settlements not only in the territories but also in East Jerusalem.

What makes the wrangling particularly frustrating is that, two weeks ago, Shamir appeared ready to sign on to the Washington meeting. But last week Shamir succumbed to pressure from Likud hard-liners, who argue that Baker's conditions will put Jerusalem up for negotiation and allow an indirect role for the P.L.O. He demanded that East Jerusalem's 140,000 Arabs not vote or run in elections and warned that Israel would walk away from any negotiations that appeared to involve the P.L.O.

Shamir has hopelessly encumbered Baker's formula, which in its own convoluted fashion aimed to grant the P.L.O. leadership an indirect voice while enabling Israel to pretend that the P.L.O. was not a party to the talks. Labor has vowed that if the Cabinet does not endorse Baker's formula, it will pull out of the coalition. So much for simple four-step peace plans.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Jon D. Hull/Jerusalem