Bid for Kremlin Mideast Peace Role? : Soviets and Allies Quietly Rebuild Ties With Israel

The Soviet Union and its Eastern European partners have begun a discreet but systematic process of reopening cultural and political contacts with Israel that have been blocked for 18 years.

Diplomatic observers believe that a continuing series of East Bloc overtures to Israel in the last few weeks may be part of an orchestrated effort by Moscow to win Israel’s eventual acceptance of the Soviet Union as an equal participant alongside the United States in Middle East peace efforts.

While there appears to be no immediate prospect of the Soviet Union or its allies restoring full diplomatic relations with Israel, the gestures of recent weeks have provided what some analysts regard as evidence of new flexibility and pragmatism in Soviet policy toward Israel. The overtures have also given rise to widespread hopes that Moscow will permit an increase in Jewish emigration, now at its lowest ebb since the 1960s.

Within the next few months, Poland and Israel are to exchange diplomatic representatives for the first time since 1967, when the Soviet Union and all of its Warsaw Pact allies except Romania severed diplomatic relations with Israel because of the Arab-Israeli war. The diplomatic representatives will nominally process visas.

Polish government spokesman Jerzy Urban has said that the foreign ministers of the two countries agreed on the exchange when they met last month at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. Urban said it was the third such contact between Poland and Israel “in recent years.”

Poland also has agreed to resume cultural exchanges. According to Polish officials, who asked not to be identified, the state opera company is scheduled to tour Israel for the first time in December and will be followed next May by a renowned Polish folk-dancing troupe, the Mazowsze company.

A third performing group, the Teatr Nowy of Poznan, will visit Israel “in the coming months,” according to the government newspaper Rzeczpospolita.

In addition to these steps by Poland, Hungary is expected to exchange low-level diplomatic representatives with Israel soon, with each side’s diplomats working under the auspices of a neutral country’s embassy in Tel Aviv and Budapest. There are unconfirmed reports from Budapest that the former Israeli Embassy in the Hungarian capital is being refurbished for this purpose.

In an interview with Israeli television Wednesday, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir said: “In the past few days, we received information that another Warsaw Pact country wants to strengthen ties with us. But they have requested that this not be made public.”

Israeli radio later reported that Hungary and Israel will soon exchange representatives, and there were unconfirmed reports that the Soviet Union has also indicated its willingness to do so. Some Arab nations, including Egypt and Jordan, have reportedly urged the Soviets to restore ties with Israel as a way to advance toward a Mideast peace settlement.

The moves followed a series of private meetings that Shamir held in New York withthe foreign ministers of Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. The Israeli Foreign Ministry has acknowledged that the meetings took place and said their purpose was to discuss trade and cultural ties.

However, Western diplomats in Warsaw said it was unthinkable that any of the three Eastern European countries would take such steps independently, let alone simultaneously, without close consultation with the Kremlin. “This does appear to be a coordinated initiative by Moscow,” one diplomat said.

“It would appear that we are already beyond the stage of Ping-Pong diplomacy,” he added, in a reference to the visit by an American table tennis team to China in 1971 that eventually led to full diplomatic relations with Peking.

Yugoslavia, another Communist state but not a member of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, also is apparently ready to exchange representatives with the Jewish state.

Israel’s respected Haaretz newspaper said Thursday that the Israeli representative’s office in Yugoslavia will be opened in Belgrade, the capital.

It said that although envoys from Israel and Yugoslavia will offically serve as trade and economic representatives, “the intention is to have low-level diplomatic relations.”

The Soviet Union, for its part, has given exit visas to several well-known Jewish refuseniks since the beginning of October. This week, Moscow signaled its willingness to let Yelena Bonner, the wife of dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, travel to the West for medical treatment, and to return. Bonner is of Jewish descent.

In a smaller but still significant gesture earlier in October in Paris, the Soviets broke with their usual practice of excluding Israelis from all Soviet diplomatic functions by inviting Israel’s ambassador to France, Ovadia Sofer, to a reception for visiting Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The invitation followed private talks last July between the Soviet and Israeli ambassadors in France, which led to a flurry of reports--strongly denied by the Soviet Union’s official Tass news agency--that Moscow had softened its terms for restoring relations with Israel.

Diplomatic observers believe that these gestures are not, in fact, likely to herald the revival of full-scale diplomatic and trade relations anytime soon, unless Israel is willing to make major political concessions that would affect its strategic position.

In the past, Moscow has offered to restore relations if Israel were to withdraw from the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Gaza Strip, the territories it seized during the 1967 war.

In recent statements, Prime Minister Shimon Peres has said Israel will accept a role for the Kremlin in Mideast peace efforts “if it renews relations with Israel and if its policy advances peace and not hinders it,” according to Israel radio.

Diplomats in Warsaw believe that the East Bloc may have several aims in its revival of low-level contacts with Israel.

First, these observers believe, Moscow is dangling the prospect of gradually renewed contact with the historic centers of European Jewry in Eastern Europe--and perhaps also an increase in Jewish emigration--as a way of enticing Israel to accept its longstanding proposal for a general Middle East peace conference.

Under the Soviet proposal, the United States and the Soviet Union would have equal roles in negotiating a comprehensive settlement of the Palestinians’ demand for a homeland and Israel’s demand for secure borders. Israel has refused to take part in such a conference on the ground that it has no diplomatic relations with Moscow.

“What we may be seeing is an attempt to get the Israelis to climb down from their position,” one experienced diplomat said.

Others said it is also possible that Moscow is using the Poles and Hungarians as “stalking horses” to test the reactions of radical Arab states to renewed contacts with Israel and also perhaps to open new channels of communication with the Israelis.

Maverick Romania, alone among the Warsaw Pact countries, has maintained full diplomatic ties with Israel, but the Soviets are thought to consider President Nicolae Ceausescu a less-than-reliable emissary on their behalf.

Centuries of Jewish tradition have imbued other Eastern European countries with their own strong motivations for establishing ties with Israel, although Moscow has managed to restrain them. Besides restoring cultural ties, Eastern Europeans appear eager to tap into Israel’s technological prowess in the struggle to modernize their own economies.

Of all the Eastern European countries, Poland--the focal point of the Nazi Holocaust and the native land of many Israelis--has the strongest natural basis for relations with Israel. Despite the lack of diplomatic relations, Poland has kept up contacts with Israel in the continuing search for war criminals and in the maintenance of wartime memorials.

Last year, Poland made a special effort to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944.

Polish officials have privately expressed hope that, through Israel and the American Jewish community, they may be able to persuade the Reagan Administration to lift its remaining economic sanctions and restore full trade and credit relations with Poland.

“Certainly there must be economic considerations operating here, too,” a European diplomat said here. He noted that the Polish leader, Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski, took time during his visit to the United Nations last month to meet with American businessmen, including Edgar M. Bronfman, the president of the World Jewish Congress.

Under an agreement reached between the Israeli and Polish foreign ministers, one Israeli diplomat will open an “interests section” in Warsaw in the Netherlands Embassy, whose own staff has handled Polish visa applications for Israel since 1967. Western diplomats said the Israeli representative will probably re-occupy the former Israeli Embassy, but under the Netherlands flag. The Dutch have maintained the empty embassy over the last 18 years at Israeli expense.

Until recently, the Finnish Embassy in Tel Aviv represented Poland in Israel, but diplomats said this arrangement lapsed more than a year ago. Under the new agreement, a Polish diplomat is to set up a “visa section” in the Tel Aviv branch of the Polish bank PKO, which has been operating since 1933.

This unusual arrangement, diplomats said, would not rule out the possibility of Poland and Israel expanding representations to form full-scale embassies in every respect but the name.

The United States, they noted, currently offers two models for de facto embassies in countries with which Washington has no formal diplomatic relations. The staff of the American “interests section” of the Swiss Embassy in Cuba is made up of U.S. Foreign Service officers who outnumber the Swiss. In Taiwan, nominally “retired” American diplomats represent the United States under the rubric of the American Institute in Taiwan; Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington is called the Coordinating Council for North American Affairs.