Peres Sees Window of Opportunity Closing on Peace Unless Reagan Acts

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is pressing the Reagan Administration to push more aggressively for an international Middle East peace conference, arguing that if the Americans do not move quickly, a combination of the 1988 presidential elections and a more active Soviet policy in the region will destroy a historic opportunity for a settlement.

Peres and his key advisers have been scrambling to keep the peace conference idea alive despite their inability to win any endorsement from Israel’s coalition government.

They counted this week’s three-day visit by Egyptian Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid as a point in their favor. Meguid was the first top-ranking Egyptian official to visit Israel in six years, and he came down clearly on Peres’ side in the Israeli political debate over an international conference.

However, a key Peres adviser said in an interview Thursday that the conference supporters’ accomplishments thus far have only partially made up for the damage done by Washington’s silence at a key point in the delicate political maneuvering last spring.

And now, added the adviser, who spoke only with a promise of anonymity, it is imperative that the Reagan Administration pressure Moscow to take a clear stand on the peace conference so that preliminary talks, at least, can get under way by late 1987 or early 1988.

The alternative, this official warned, is that Washington will lose some of its ability to influence events in the region and that the result will be “the end of the peace process.”

Neither Peres nor his advisers have made much effort lately to hide their disappointment over what they consider a mistake by Washington two months ago: the failure to confirm publicly what they describe as a “breakthrough” agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein on the key ground rules for an international peace conference.

Secret London Meeting

The guidelines were worked out through U.S. mediation and approved at a secret April 11 meeting in London between Peres and Hussein. And from Peres’ point of view, they answered most of the primary objections raised by his domestic political opponents, most importantly Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, whose rightist Likud Bloc is joined to Peres’ centrist Labor Alignment in the coalition.

Jordanian, Egyptian and U.S. officials have now confirmed that among the key points agreed to were these:

--The conference should be called to order under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council and its five permanent members--Britain, France, China, the United States and the Soviet Union.

--It would break up into bilateral committees for direct negotiations between Israel and its neighbors.

--No solutions could be imposed on these bilateral committees.

--All participants would endorse U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 and disavow violence.

--Palestinians would be represented as part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.

The problem, the Peres adviser said Thursday, is that “the maximum impact in terms of the domestic debate could have taken place in the first few weeks” after the London agreement. “It was at that time that we needed the witness to stand up and testify.”

The “witness” whom Peres was counting on was the United States, and its failure to deliver, according to the foreign minister’s advisers, left him open to damaging criticism from political opponents here that he was distorting the picture or concealing embarrassing details in his own upbeat comments on the peace process.

“I think if (Secretary of State George P.) Shultz had been here on May 1, we would already be at a conference,” the Peres confidant said.

He referred to a proposed Shultz visit to the region, which was canceled at the urging of Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, Moshe Arens. Arens, now a government minister without portfolio, made a last-minute trip to Washington at the behest of his party leader, Shamir, to dissuade Shultz.

Coming on top of the London agreements, Peres saw the proposed Shultz trip as creating such diplomatic momentum that the conference could not be stopped.

However, according to reliable sources here, Arens warned the secretary of state that for him to make the trip would amount to interference in what must remain an internal Israeli political debate, touching issues of its very existence as a sovereign state. Arens argued that this could do irreparable harm to the close American-Israeli relationship.

Instead of the Shultz trip, there were two critical “inner Cabinet” meetings in May at which Peres was stymied when senior ministers split evenly, along party lines, for and against the conference.

On Thursday, Shamir again stated his opposition to the conference. Speaking on Israel Army radio, the prime minister said Israel must firmly reject the idea in order to convince Arab states that direct talks are the only way to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“The sooner we drop this harmful international conference proposal from our agenda, the closer we will come to the road that is likely to bring peace--direct negotiations,” he said.

“Everyone knows my stand--that I am willing to meet with the head of any Arab state. Such meetings can only bring peace closer and improve our ties with our Arab neighbors.”

The Peres aide said Thursday that there are really two debates under way in Israel: One is the “legitimate” and exclusively Israeli argument over whether an international conference is in Israel’s best interests; and the other, an “illegitimate” one, is over the conference ground rules.

“We failed to communicate (to Washington) the difference between the two debates,” the aide commented. And as a result, the Reagan Administration was so anxious to stay out of the genuine political argument that it also failed to clearly attest to the basic elements of an agreement that it had helped to nail down over the previous 30 months. Yet that, the aide said, “was the only way to demonstrate to the (Israeli) public that Peres is not a liar.”

Peres hinted at the same point during a speech to American Jewish leaders here last week.

“The United States says they don’t want to get themselves involved in Israeli politics,” he noted. “Hurrah! I’m for it. . . . But while being objective on Israeli politics, they shouldn’t become neutral on the peace process.”

That distinction, according to Peres aides, is one that Shultz now realizes, based on remarks that he made to a Hadassah convention in Baltimore on July 14. Shultz warned there about the ticking of the “demographic clock” in Israel, a reference to the rapid growth of the Palestinian population in the territories that Israel occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War. Because of that growth, experts have projected, the population under the Jewish state’s control will soon be nearly half Arab.

Offering a Difference

Meanwhile, Shultz said, the peace process is “beset by partisanship. . . . Those who oppose the exploration of new ideas, or even revisiting the old ideas, have an obligation to offer something different as an alternative to the status quo.”

Shamir tried during Meguid’s visit this week to offer alternatives: the opening of long-stalled Palestinian “autonomy” talks originally proposed in the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, or a “mini-peace conference” involving the United States, Egypt, Jordan and Israel.

But Meguid, as expected, rejected both as either impractical or stale.

It was “useful” to have an Egyptian leader publicly shoot down these ideas, the Peres aide commented Thursday, because “it may influence the public debate” in Israel.

Peres’ advisers are hoping that Shultz’s speech to Hadassah presages the more active American role that they hope for. The key, said one, is the Soviet Union.

While some critics say the international conference is only a way to invite the Soviet Union to take a bigger role in the region, one aide argued that this view “ignores that the Russians are not tiptoeing in. They’ve kicked down the door and are running all over the place.”

This aide noted a string of Soviet Middle East initiatives in recent months and commented: “They’re opening up options. They’re doing everything their Middle East experts have been suggesting for seven years. . . . The sum of what they’re doing is not a change in the balance of forces in the region, but the beginning of a much more active Soviet role in the Middle East.”

And unless the United States acts before it becomes busy with the 1988 presidential campaign, this aide added, the danger is that the Soviets will set an international conference agenda that precludes Israeli participation.

“I’m saying that’s the end of the peace process,” the aide said.

At meetings in Geneva this month, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy outlined for his Soviet counterpart, Vladimir P. Polyakov, details of the proposed Middle East conference and sought Moscow’s agreement on the ground rules, according to Israeli officials. He also sought Soviet commitments regarding the renewal of diplomatic relations with Israel and stepped-up emigration of Soviet Jews.

Now, the Peres aide said, Washington must demand Moscow’s answers. If the Soviets agree to the ground rules, “that will hopefully help us get a decision here,” the aide forecast. If they fail to do so, then it would be an argument for Hussein to enter the talks without Soviet involvement.