Peres, Mubarak End Talks, Back Drive for Peace

The Egyptian and Israeli leaders concluded their first summit meeting in five years Friday with a joint call to dedicate 1987 to the search for Middle East peace, but they took only modest steps of their own in that direction.

While President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel said they agreed in principle that an international conference could bring peace to the Middle East and that a committee should be formed to prepare for such a conference, both emphasized that there was not enough time during their 24-hour meeting to make more substantial progress.

Elegant Palace

“The only common enemy we have discovered in the last 24 hours is the shortage of time,” Peres said in a statement. Besides their joint communique, Peres and Mubarak both issued brief statements before the closing ceremony at the elegant Ras el Tin summer palace overlooking the Mediterranean.

The only concrete result of the summit appears to be Egypt’s decision to normalize its diplomatic relations with Israel by returning an ambassador to Tel Aviv. Esmat Abdel Meguid, the Egyptian foreign minister, announced that Mohammed Bassiouni, who has been in charge of Egypt’s diplomatic mission in Israel, will become the new ambassador. Egypt withdrew its ambassador from Israel four years ago to protest the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Beirut by Israeli-supported Christian militiamen.

Both sides apparently wanted to put the best face on the meeting, but their joint statement was only the minimum that Israeli officials had said before the summit they hoped to achieve. At least some of them made no secret of their disappointment.

‘Radicals Will Do It’

Avraham Tamir, director general of the prime minister’s office, said of what he had seen as an opportunity for substantive progress: “It was like a cow ready to milk, but no one milked her.” The danger now, Tamir warned, is that “the radicals will do it.”

Mubarak said in his closing statement to the press that the two leaders had agreed on the need to organize a committee to prepare for an international conference on Middle East peace. But the agreement was not mentioned in the joint communique, which merely declared that 1987 will be “a year of negotiations for peace” and called on “all parties concerned” to exert an intensive effort toward that end.

Peres, on returning to Israel, confirmed at an airport press conference that it is still not clear when any conference preparation committee will meet or who will be its members. He said that he and Mubarak had reached “a reasonable degree of understanding” on such matters but no detailed agreement.

David Kimche, director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said that the committee would include representatives of Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians and that it would “examine what the international conference will discuss, who will participate and when.”

PLO Opposed

Previously Peres has said that Israel would agree, under certain conditions, to an international conference on peace in the Middle East. But Israel opposes any participation in such a conference by the Palestine Liberation Organization or by such countries as the Soviet Union that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel.

Israel also has insisted that an international conference “accompany” rather than replace direct negotiations among the confrontational states and that international sponsors have no veto power over agreements reached directly between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Israeli officials confirmed that the talks in Alexandria had established no mechanism for future action.

“At least I thought we would agree on a mechanism for how to proceed with this process,” Tamir said. But he was wrong, he added; there are “no working groups, no nothing.”

‘Nothing Decided’

Muhammed Beltagi, the Egyptian government spokesman, agreed. “Nothing has been decided” about further meetings to prepare for an international conference, he said.

Uri Savir, the spokesman for Peres, said, “I don’t think it’s even needed,” when asked about the absence of any agreed framework on further contacts with Egypt. He said the results of the Alexandria talks were “far above expectations.”

Other aides to Peres insisted that there had been more in the way of agreement between the two leaders than was reflected in their joint statement. One member, asking not to be further identified, said, “The problem is that it’s much easier to agree on the content than on the way to express it in public.”

Nonetheless, even the more upbeat members of the Israeli delegation conceded that hopes of issuing a more detailed final statement were dashed when the two sides failed to agree on key issues.

‘Time Was Pressing’

Peres said in Tel Aviv that he and Mubarak agreed “that the right way to solve the Palestinian problem is in the framework of a Jordanian-Palestinian agreement.” But he said their differences over details prevented inclusion of that in their communique. “If we had a few more hours, we could put that in writing, but as I said, time was pressing,” Peres said.

Savir said the main problem was Egypt’s insistence on referring to the Palestinians’ right of self-determination within the context of a confederation with Jordan. He said this is “PLO language” and unacceptable to Israel, which will have nothing to do with the PLO. It regards that organization as a terrorist group unfit to represent the Palestinian people in any negotiations.

Peres is expected to brief President Reagan and other U.S. officials on his meetings with Mubarak during a visit to Washington next week. However, Israeli officials acknowledged that there was not enough progress in Alexandria to justify a higher level of American involvement in the peace process at this time.

‘Not Ready for Shultz’

Just a few weeks ago, these same officials were pressing for Secretary of State George P. Shultz to attend the Peres-Mubarak meeting to provide more momentum for the peace process. But one of them admitted Friday: “We’re not ready for Shultz yet. There’s a lot more staff work that has to be done.”

In purely political terms, the meeting here was seen by observers as more successful for Peres than Mubarak. Much of the Arab world still rejects the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 as a “separate deal” that violated Arab unity and undermined the Palestinian cause.

And Mubarak, who has worked hard to re-establish Egypt’s place among the Arab nations, was under considerable pressure either not to meet Peres at all, or, if he did, to extract some major concession from the Israeli leader on the Palestinian issue.

Mubarak and Peres did put the Palestinian problem at the top of their agenda, but instead of achieving a major concession, Mubarak can point only to a general promise in the joint statement to seek solutions to the problem “in all its aspects.”

Camp David Language

As he did in his meeting with Morocco’s King Hassan II in July, Peres specifically rejected recognition of a Palestinian right of self-determination, which Israel considers a code term for an independent Palestinian state. Instead, Peres said that “the Palestinians have a right to participate in the determination of their own future”--a phrase close to the language of the 1978 Camp David agreements that led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty the following year.

Mubarak, meanwhile, did not even mention the PLO in his closing statement to the press, a significant omission by any Arab leader, given the Arab League’s continued recognition of the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people.

Mubarak is reportedly unhappy with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat for his failure to endorse key U.N. resolutions that recognize Israel’s right to exist--a step the Egyptian leader feels would result in enormous pressure on both the United States and Israel to acknowledge the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Libya and Syria denounced the Egyptian-Israeli summit meeting and called Friday for Mubarak’s overthrow. Newspapers in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also criticized the meeting.

Post Exchange Due

Peres, meanwhile, appeared to avoid any action or promise that could cause a premature showdown with the right-wing Likud Bloc partners in the national unity government he will head until next month, when he is scheduled to exchange posts with Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

A Likud member of Parliament, Dan Meridor, who joined the Israeli delegation here as Shamir’s representative, said he was “not very happy” about some of the proposals he heard on the Palestinian issue. But later, a smiling Meridor said his fears were eased by the joint statement, which he said he could wholeheartedly support.

Likud opposes the kind of “land-for-peace” deal with the Arabs that Peres’ Labor Alignment sees as the answer to the problem of the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River and Gaza Strip and the 1.3 million Palestinians who live in those territories.

On the other hand, the summit conference offered Peres a chance to enhance his image as a statesman, and this will be helpful whenever he gets ready to take on the Likud in new elections.

“The symbolism of the meeting, the effect in Israel of the ceremony, the flag, the anthem, the enormous coverage in the Egyptian press today--this is a new picture of Egyptian-Israeli relations,” commented Abba Eban, a Labor member of Parliament and former foreign minister.

‘Effects of Stalemate’

In their joint statment, Peres and Mubarak said they view “with great concern the effects of the stalemate” on the Middle East peace process. They said that an Egyptian-Israeli agreement signed on Thursday, calling for a border dispute to be submitted to international arbitration, was “a promising model to be followed and built upon,” and an alternative to “the spirit of confrontation and violence.”

The statement said that with the border dispute, over a sliver of Sinai beachfront called Taba, having been handed over to arbitration, “the two countries can now concentrate their efforts on reviving the comprehensive peace process.”