Talks With Peres Fail, Morocco King Indicates

King Hassan II of Morocco on Wednesday defended his summit meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres but indicated that the historic encounter has ended in failure because of what he described as the Israeli leader’s refusal to address the basic Arab conditions for peace in the Middle East.

However, an upbeat Peres termed the meeting an historic one that will lead to an acceleration of the search for peace.

Hassan, in a somber yet dramatic 50-minute televised address, officially informed the Moroccan people for the first time that he had been meeting with Peres since Monday at a palatial hilltop retreat at Ifrane, a summer resort 125 miles east of Rabat.

Brushing aside criticism from several Arab countries, the king said the talks were held to explore the possibilities for peace in the Middle East in light of growing disarray in the Arab world and a political climate in Israel that is expected to shift sharply to the right. In October, Peres is to turn over the premiership to the leader of the right-wing Likud Bloc, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, under an inter-party rotation agreement.

Although Hassan said that his concern over these two alarming drifts prompted him to invite Peres to “exploratory” summit talks, he expressed bitter disappointment over the outcome. He specifically blamed the summit’s outcome on Peres’ refusal to consider either negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization or an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territories captured during the 1967 Middle East War.

“I said, ‘You have to talk to the PLO,’ and Peres said no. He said, ‘I don’t recognize it.’ I asked, ‘What do you say about the occupied lands? You have to free them.’ He said, ‘I am not going to withdraw.’

“I told him, ‘If that is how things are, then good night.’ Everybody will go his own way,” the king said, according to an unofficial translation of his speech, which was delivered in Arabic.

Hassan said that he conducted his talks with Peres within the framework of the Fez Plan, an eight-point program adopted by the Arab League in 1982 in an effort to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The plan appeared to implicitly recognize Israel’s right to exist, but also would have required the Israelis to withdraw from all Arab territories occupied since the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem, to dismantle settlements in the occupied areas, to create an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and to recognize the PLO as “the sole, legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people. Israel balked at the plan.

Other Proposals Raised

Hassan said that while Peres refused to negotiate with the PLO or consider giving up the occupied territories--the main Arab conditions for negotiating peace with Israel--the Israeli leader did raise other proposals for peace at the summit meeting, which ended Wednesday night. However, while the monarch did not elaborate on those proposals, he appeared to discount them as insufficient.

Hassan said his next step will be to send letters to “all Arab heads of state to explain our motives for meeting Peres, to inform them of the elements he brought us and to (tell them) of his negative answers to the two major questions” concerning negotiations with the PLO and withdrawal from the occupied territories.

“I will tell all Arab brothers and they will know what to do and what steps to take,” Hassan said.

Sober and Defensive

The monarch’s sober and at times defensive account of his motives for inviting Peres, of how the meeting came about and its outcome contrasted sharply in tone from the account given by Peres upon his return to Jerusalem early this morning.

Calling himself “highly encouraged,” Peres termed his meeting with Hassan a “historic” one that “will lead to an acceleration of the peace process in the area.” And he said the two sides had agreed to future bilateral meetings at an undetermined level and time.

Speaking to a crowded news conference upon his pre-dawn return to Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv, Peres gave a decidedly upbeat version of his two days of talks at the king’s mountaintop retreat.

While “we started with a very wide gap between the Israeli position and the . . . Arab position,” Peres said, the two leaders “found there is much more of a common denominator--if not for anything else, at least for the mere fact that we could have met face to face and try to look where are the opportunities and not only where do the problems reside.”

No New Ideas Advanced

The Israeli prime minister also said he had not advanced any new ideas at the talks “more than is known as the public position of Israel,” adding, “King Hassan received an explanation, a more exact one, of positions that are known.”

Israeli analysts suggested that the king could have been expected to play down the significance of the talks, which constituted only the second public contact between an Israeli leader and an Arab head of state ever, and which were roundly criticized by hard-line Arab regimes.

The analysts noted that Peres and Hassan had held a previously unscheduled third round of discussions Wednesday, and they added that agreement on a joint communique--scheduled to be released today--was more than the prime minister had expected.

(For their part, however, Moroccan officials indicated that while a statement will be issued, it will not be described--by the Moroccan side, at least--as a joint communique.)

‘I Wasn’t Surprised’

At his press conference, Peres said “I wasn’t surprised” by the king’s comments following the talks, and he noted that the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat took a similarly hard-line approach in a speech to the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, on his historic 1977 visit to Jerusalem. Sadat’s visit marked the first public meeting between Israeli and Arab heads of state, and two years later the two nations signed a peace treaty.

Peres said he and King Hassan had not discussed establishment of relations between Morocco and Israel.

Regarding the Moroccan monarch’s demand that Israel recognize the PLO, Peres commented, “The problem remains who is really and seriously not only representing the Palestinians, but who is representing the Palestinian wish to try and settle the conflict in a peaceful manner--not by violence or terror.”

After Peres’ return, Israel television broadcast film from the summit meeting. Television correspondent Yigal Goren, who accompanied Peres on his trip, quoted King Hassan as telling the visiting prime minister that the monarch’s initiative is different from Sadat’s. “He did it to gain territory, but I want to prevent bloodshed for future generations,” Goren quoted Hassan as saying.

Peres is expected to brief the Israeli Cabinet on his visit, possibly later today. The centrist prime minister’s right-wing partners in Israel’s coalition government have voiced muted concern over his trip.

Foreign Minister Shamir said the Moroccan visit was planned with his knowledge, if not necessarily his blessing.

Peres praised Hassan’s “very courageous move” in meeting him and said the king had been motivated by a genuine desire for peace.

‘Most Important Message’

“The king, being in fact the titular head of the Arab League, was speaking on behalf of the Arab countries, the Arab people,” Peres said. “The most important message (of the contact) probably is that it will be continued in the future by more meetings and in many other ways.”

However, the obvious Arab anger over Hassan’s surprise meeting with Peres has prompted speculation that radical Arab states will seek to censure Morocco and perhaps even mount a campaign to suspend its membership in the Arab League, as happened to Egypt after Sadat made peace with Israel in 1979.

Syria has already severed diplomatic relations with Morocco, while other Arab states, notably Algeria, Iraq and Libya, have condemned the meeting.

In his speech, Hassan alluded to the fact that other Arab leaders have met secretly with Israeli officials in the past, and he said other Arabs have no right to criticize him. Defending his decision to meet with Peres, he declared that it is about time that Arabs and Israeli leaders discuss the issues dividing them.

‘I Met Him Openly’

“I did not meet him secretly like the others. . . . I am proud I met him openly,” Hassan said. “It is not cowardly to talk to one’s enemy. . . . We are not fighting an imaginary enemy. We are fighting an enemy that exists on our land.”

Lambasting other Arabs for “wasting” their time in criticizing and fighting one another while ignoring their real problems, Hassan bemoaned the “lack of conscience and responsibility” that has embroiled the Arab world in internecine strife. “Have we become so stupid that we could be tricked into fighting secondary battles?” he asked. “Is it not a shame upon us that we spend our time cursing and fighting each other?”

Recounting his efforts to arrange the summit with Peres, which he first suggested publicly eight months ago, Hassan disclosed that he rejected Israeli and American proposals to meet the Israeli leader in Washington this week during a visit that he was to have made to the United States but postponed, ostensibly for health reasons.

Hassan said U.S. officials were informed of the talks in advance by Israel and sought to have the meeting held in Washington.

“(President) Reagan sent me a cable saying he had heard of the meeting and asking me to hold it in America so he could support it,” Hassan said.

The monarch said he rejected the idea because “if I make a mistake, I want to be the only one responsible for it.” He added that he was concerned that if the meeting had been held in Washington, his Arab critics could claim that “I had taken orders from Reagan.”

Michael Ross reported from Ifrane, Morocco, and Dan Fisher from Jerusalem.