Israeli Officials See Hussein’s Move as Validating Their View of PLO

Israel’s normally fractious coalition government reacted with unusual unanimity Thursday to the announcement by Jordan’s King Hussein that his efforts to pursue a joint Mideast peace policy with the Palestine Liberation Organization have failed.

Both the centrists represented by Prime Minister Shimon Peres and the rightists headed by Yitzhak Shamir, deputy prime minister and foreign minister, said, in effect: “I told you so.”

In a nationally televised, three-hour address Wednesday night, Hussein told his countrymen that he could no longer continue his joint search for peace with the PLO because the organization lacks “commitment, credibility, and consistency.”

“I am not surprised,” commented Peres on Thursday. “From the very beginning, I didn’t believe that something good can come out of the negotiations with the PLO.”

A statement issued by Shamir’s Foreign Ministry said, “King Hussein confirms what Israel has always said about the PLO--namely that the PLO is an obstacle to peace, does not contribute to peace and cannot be a partner in the peace process.”

Beyond those statements, however, the senior Israeli coalition partners sounded decidedly differing notes as they assessed the impact of the yearlong Jordanian-PLO initiative and the prospects for the future.

An aide to Peres stressed that the Hussein-Arafat split vindicates the prime minister’s strategy of “divide and conquer.” The result has been to put Hussein back where Peres’ Labor Alignment bloc has always wanted him--on “center stage in terms of the whole Palestinian-Jordanian issue,” the aide said.

And Peres said that it is now time to explore alternatives in the peace process.

“I don’t know what is the next step,” he said in an Israel radio interview. “I know what is the direction; it remains the direction of peace.”

By contrast, an official believed to reflect the thinking of Shamir said that the last year has been a “waste of time” in terms of the peace process.

And the Foreign Ministry statement stressed that “we still believe that the only way to a solution is through direct negotiations in the framework of Camp David.” The Camp David reference was to the accords that led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. That framework calls for talks leading to some sort of autonomy for Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The failure of Hussein and Arafat to patch up their differences during marathon meetings earlier this month was not news to the Israeli leadership, which had been briefed by U.S. envoy Wat T. Cluverius IV on his return from monitoring the recent Jordanian-PLO talks in Amman.

Policy Outlined

And analysts here said Thursday that the outline of the policy preferred by Peres, at least, is already clear. Its primary elements are to:

--Keep the door open to Hussein for direct negotiations with Israel, even though the king stressed Wednesday night that he remains opposed to bilateral talks.

--Encourage West Bank Palestinians to join Hussein in peace talks without PLO participation, partly through the incentive of a so-called devolution of Israeli powers in the occupied territories to local residents.

--Put more stress on current negotiations aimed at warming up the “cold” Israeli peace with Egypt, talks that one analyst described as “the only game in town” in the wake of Hussein’s speech.

Complicating the Israeli situation is a unique rotation provision in the coalition agreement binding Peres’ Labor Alignment and the rightist Likud Bloc. Under the clause, Peres is to trade jobs with Shamir in October. The rotation date is seen by some Mideast experts as a deadline for a negotiating breakthrough, since Shamir takes a much harder line.

A Different Approach

While Peres still appears anxious to keep up at least the appearance of momentum in the peace process, his Likud partners take a different approach.

“Tell me, why should we complain about the status quo?” asked Eliahu Ben-Elissar, a leading Likud member of the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and Israel’s first ambassador to Egypt, in an interview. “Is the status quo that bad? Are we in open war, as we are with Syria, for instance?”

Ben-Elissar added that those who encouraged the idea that there was real movement in the peace process during the last year had deluded themselves and the public.

“There was no peace process in the last year,” he said. “There was an effort on the part of some Americans and some Israelis to engage a peace process, but those efforts have failed.”

Ben-Elissar said he is not happy about the failure. “I would have preferred by far King Hussein being able to engage in negotiations,” he said. But “he simply can’t do it. He’s not the man to do it. He doesn’t want to do it.”

“We are back to square one, in the sense that this is where Labor wanted to be all along,” countered Shlomo Avinieri, a Hebrew University political scientist and former director general of the Foreign Ministry. He said that Peres will now try to keep the momentum going.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin “gave the first shot yesterday,” he added, referring to a television interview within minutes after Hussein’s speech.

Rabin, from the Labor Party, said the Jordan-PLO split has given residents of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip “a golden opportunity to take their fate in their own hands.”

Devolution Planned

To encourage this independent stance, Peres has already endorsed a plan for the devolution of powers to Arab residents of the occupied territories. While similar to his previous pledges to improve the “quality of life” on the West Bank, his emphasis on it now is seen as a direct result of the failure of the Hussein-Arafat talks.

Peres told Parliament last week that “we are ready to transfer the administration of civil life in the spheres of health, housing, commerce, tourism, and so forth to Arab administrators.”

He said Israel also wants to appoint Arab mayors in those West Bank towns still run by Israelis, to intensify economic development in the area and to facilitate ties of the residents to the outside Arab world.

“I think that this will still keep the options for political settlement in the future open,” said Gad Yaacobi, economic planning minister and author of the devolution plan. “But it will close, I hope, the option of annexation of Judea and Samaria to the state of Israel,” he added, using the Biblical names preferred here for the territories.