Soviets to Send Delegation to Israel for Talks

Senior government officials said here Wednesday that a Soviet delegation is expected to arrive for official talks in Israel by mid-April in the latest sign of a potentially major shift in Moscow’s attitude toward the Jewish state.

The visit, to be followed at an unspecified future date by a similar consular-level Israeli trip to the Soviet Union, would mark the first such exchange between the two countries since Moscow broke diplomatic relations with Israel during the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War of 1967.

While the Israelis clearly hope that these initial contacts will eventually lead to renewal of formal relations, officials here emphasized that the exchange of consular visits represents, at most, a small first step toward that goal.

They specifically denied a Radio Luxembourg report Wednesday night that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has already invited Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to visit Moscow.

In contrast to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Peres has publicly endorsed the idea of an international Middle East peace conference at which the Soviets could play a role, provided they first renew relations with Israel. Normally arch political rivals, Peres and Shamir are temporarily joined together in a tenuous “national unity” coalition government here.

To ease any fears that he might be going behind the prime minister’s back, Peres--who is also deputy prime minister--reportedly telephoned Shamir on Wednesday evening to personally deny the Radio Luxembourg report.

“It’s not impossible that at one stage or another there will be an Israeli invited to Moscow,” commented a senior government source. “But I think we’ve not yet reached that.”

Nevertheless, the agreed-upon exchange of consular visits follows other signs of a newly flexible Soviet attitude toward Israel. In another development Wednesday, for example, the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration in Geneva announced that 470 Jews have been allowed to leave the Soviet Union in March--the highest monthly total since July, 1981.

While the figure is still far below the peak Jewish emigration figures of up to 5,000 a month in 1979, the increase from the extremely low emigration rate of recent years is seen here as significant.

U.S. Jewish leaders who met with senior Soviet officials in Moscow last week said that the Russians promised to allow out within a year as many as 11,000 Soviet Jews previously refused permission to emigrate.

New Romanian Route

Israeli sources confirmed Wednesday that government officials are in direct contact with their Soviet counterparts to try to finalize details of a plan to fly these emigrants to Israel via Romania. One official said he could still not say when the first planeload of Soviet Jews would arrive via the new Romanian route, but “we are working on it.”

Soviet Jewry activists here clearly remained skeptical about Moscow’s intentions.

And former “prisoner of Zion” Yosef Mendelevich warned Wednesday that if a Soviet delegation does arrive here before the release of two more Jewish prisoners still held in Russian jails, “there will be a very bad reception for this delegation.”

“I doubt that they will be able to do what they are planning to do here in Israel,” he added. “The ground will burn under their feet.”

The First or the Last?

Former Soviet human rights activist Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky added that while he is pleased at the prospect of 11,000 Soviet Jews being allowed to emigrate, the critical question is whether they will be the first of a new emigration wave or the last allowed out of the Soviet Union.

Despite such warnings, a senior government official said that Jerusalem is “cautiously optimistic” on the prospects for increased Soviet Jewish emigration. “But I think there is still a way to go until we reach an agreement with them on other matters,” he added.

Talks about a visit here by a Soviet delegation date back to April, 1986, when Moscow first proposed such a trip. The Soviets said they wanted a consular delegation to spend three months here in order to survey Russian church property in Israel and the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, to contact a few Soviet passport holders who live here and to examine the functioning of that portion of Finland’s embassy in Tel Aviv that handles Soviet interests in Israel.

It was ostensibly to discuss such a visit that Israel and the Soviet Union held their first formal talks in more than 19 years in August, 1986. That meeting in Helsinki broke up with no agreement after just one 90-minute session.

Cultural Thaw

However, informal contacts between the two governments continued through diplomats in third countries. There has also been a cultural thaw between Israel and the East Bloc nations led by Moscow, evidenced by a sharp increase in visits by musicians, dance troupes and similar figures.

The apparent agreement on the long-discussed consular exchange thus marks another small step, but possibly an important one. Asked whether the Soviet delegation is expected to confine itself to the same mission originally proposed a year ago, a top Israeli official said that the agenda “maybe will be widened.”