Peres Flies to U.S. to Report on Summit

Prime Minister Shimon Peres flew to Washington on Sunday to report to American officials on his summit meeting last week with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and to consult on what he described as the next stage of the peace process.

“A primary purpose in my trip will be to work out with the United States a peace policy for the future,” Peres told reporters before leaving Ben-Gurion International Airport at midday. “The time has come to spell out what are the needed peace initiatives.”

Peres is to meet President Reagan today and is also scheduled to see Vice President George Bush and Secretary of State George P. Shultz during his visit.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington is also trying to arrange a meeting between Peres and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, due in the United States for a U.N. General Assembly meeting.

Peres left behind a simmering controversy over his agreement in principle with Mubarak in Alexandria, Egypt, on formation of a committee to prepare an international Middle East peace conference.

The rightist Likud Bloc--half of Israel’s coalition government--has deep reservations about an international conference, seeing it as bound to be weighted against Israel.

However, with the Likud leader, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, scheduled to exchange jobs with Peres next month under a rotation provision of their coalition agreement, the right-wing ministers chose not to force the issue at a regular Cabinet meeting before Peres departed Sunday.

Praised by Shamir

Israel radio quoted ministers leaving the meeting as saying it had gone smoothly and that Shamir had even praised the results of the Egyptian summit.

According to a Cabinet communique issued after the relatively brief session, Peres “announced that he will continue to act toward an international conference in accordance” with a statement approved last year by the Knesset (Parliament) on Peres’ return from making a U.N. speech in which he first endorsed the idea.

The communique stressed that an international conference is not intended to replace direct negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors--the approach preferred by Likud--but to facilitate direct talks.

The Cabinet statement also said it is “self-evident that (an international conference) has no authority to impose solutions or to annul agreements. After the opening of the conference, negotiations will be conducted in bilateral geographical committees without international intervention.”

A joint communique issued as the Alexandria summit ended made no mention of either the preparatory committee or an international conference. But in remarks to reporters, Mubarak told reporters that he and Peres had agreed on both.

Later, Peres confirmed that there had been “agreement in principle,” although important differences remain between the two sides on many details, including the makeup of any Palestinian or Jordanian-Palestinian delegations.

Also, both Egypt and Jordan, which would be expected to play a key role in any peace talks, favor Soviet involvement to counter what they see as an American bias towards Israel in an international forum. Washington, however, is cool to that idea.

Peres said Sunday that he would agree to Soviet participation only if the Kremlin restored diplomatic relations with Israel that were severed after the 1967 Middle East War.