Israeli Marchers Display Division on Peace Process

Scores of Israeli police, some on horseback, took to the streets of downtown Jerusalem on Sunday night to keep apart hundreds of rival demonstrators who marched on the eve of a crucial government debate over the future of the Middle East peace process.

Bearded Israeli nationalists donned Arab kaffiyeh headdresses to ridicule marchers of the Peace Now movement who descended on the official residence of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to protest his opposition to an international conference on Middle East peace.

The nationalists, including members of the militant Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) West Bank Jewish settlement movement and of right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahane’s extremist Kach Party, heckled the Peace Now activists, who favor a conference plan put forward by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

Shamir, head of the rightist Likud Bloc, and Peres, leader of the centrist Labor Alignment, are the senior partners in Israel’s fragile national unity coalition government.

But Peres has threatened to pull out of the coalition unless Likud backs the peace conference plan that he has worked out over months of negotiations, with the United States as an intermediary.

Shamir contends that such a conference would turn into a trap in which Israel would come under intense pressure to make territorial concessions damaging to its security. He says that Israel should hold out for direct peace negotiations with Jordan.

The inner Cabinet of 10 senior government ministers--five each from Labor and Likud--is to open debate on Peres’ international conference proposal at a special meeting today, which is seen here as perhaps the most important during the coalition’s 32 months in government.

However, senior government sources said Sunday that no vote is likely on the plan for at least two weeks--after Peres returns from a planned trip to the United States. Today’s meeting is “only the beginning of a debate which is going to take some time, I think,” a senior aide to Shamir said in an interview.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a Peres ally, told a Labor Alignment forum Sunday that he would propose to the inner Cabinet that the government invite Secretary of State George P. Shultz to visit the region in advance of a possible international conference. He suggested that Shultz might shuttle among Jerusalem, the Jordanian capital of Amman, Cairo and possibly Damascus.

Bid to Defuse Tension

The comment was seen by some here as an attempt to defuse the political tension through compromise.

“I want to believe that, in spite of all the verbal fireworks, the Likud will realize that we must not miss this opportunity,” Rabin said. Israel has never before had such an attractive chance to begin negotiations with Jordan while enjoying American backing, he added.

Labor is “not discussing a trick to bring about new elections, but an opportunity for peace,” the defense minister stated.

“I think an attempt will be made in the Cabinet to look for some sort of compromise,” said another senior government official.

Israeli officials close to Peres said nearly two weeks ago that Jordan has agreed to bilateral peace negotiations with Israel in the context of an international Middle East peace conference, provided that the Israeli government formally approves the U.S.-brokered framework for such talks.

Jordan issued a carefully worded denial of the reports but then issued a challenge to the Israeli leaders to take a stand on the issue of an international conference.

While there appear to be several loose ends that must be tied together before any such conference can become a reality, American officials say that the latest developments represent major progress in the long-stalled Middle East peace process, for which the only notable success to date was the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

The Peres proposal to be submitted at today’s inner Cabinet meeting is embodied in what his aides call a “document of understanding” detailing the framework for direct negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors under the umbrella of a U.N.-sponsored international conference. Peres said he also has a document clarifying American commitments regarding several reservations Shamir has expressed about the plan.

Shamir said Sunday that he will present his own, alternative peace plan at today’s Cabinet meeting as a counter to the Peres proposals. His spokesman refused to reveal any details but said that the plan contains some “new elements.”

Meanwhile, Yosef Ben-Aharon, director general of Shamir’s office, was on his way to the United States to try to sway the Reagan Administration away from support for the idea of an international conference.

Before leaving here, Ben-Aharon told Israel army radio that he would urge U.S. officials “to make a joint Israeli-American effort to conduct direct negotiations with Jordan on the scale that brought us a peace treaty with Egypt.”

Peres is due to leave for Washington on Wednesday, and a Foreign Ministry spokesman said that he has postponed a planned South American extension of the trip to return here for the climax of the peace conference debate.