Peres Sabotaging Peace Efforts, Shamir Charges

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said Friday his coalition partner and rival, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, is going behind his back in an effort to sabotage Shamir’s strategy for Middle East peace.

His accusation came the day after Peres suggested that intransigence by Shamir thwarted talks with King Hussein of Jordan, which the foreign minister said could have averted the recent wave of Palestinian riots in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

At the center of the argument over peace is an initiative by the United States.

Israeli officials said Secretary of State George P. Shultz telephoned Peres and Shamir on Thursday to say he will visit the Middle East after a Feb. 21-23 trip to Moscow.

U.S. envoy Richard W. Murphy outlined the new plan to Israel’s coalition government this week.

Peres immediately endorsed the proposals, but Shamir said clarifications were needed and expressed reservations about certain aspects of the proposal. Shamir leads the right-wing Likud Bloc and Peres heads the center-left Labor Alignment.

Over Israel Radio on Thursday, the prime minister expressed frustration about what called leaks intended to undercut his negotiating position.

“Every expression of cooperation on my part is thrown in my face immediately,” he said. “I show Mr. Peres a letter, and after a few hours it is in the hands of all the reporters.

“Everything he does is in the middle of the night. What I do he wants to know about so that he can sabotage it.”

Shamir accused Peres of surrendering to Arab demands for the return of land captured in the 1967 Middle East War.

“How can you conduct negotiations together when your partner runs every day and every minute to the other side and says, ‘Don’t listen to what Shamir says, I’ll sell it to you cheaper?’ ” Shamir declared.

Moshe Shahal of the Labor party rejected Shamir’s charge that Peres was “overeager” to accept the U.S. proposals.

“We are not being overeager. The prime minister is trying to give an excuse for a period of no movement,” he said.

In a speech to party members Thursday night, Peres indirectly accused Shamir of blocking an international conference agreed to by Jordan.

“If the negotiations with an international opening had begun in April, when they could have been started, would or would it not have spared us the events in the territories?” Peres said.