Shultz Sees Hussein, Will Probably Continue Mideast Peace Bid

Secretary of State George P. Shultz conceded Tuesday that he made only imperceptible progress on the first round of his Middle East peace shuttle, but aides said he will probably return to the region in two days to continue the effort.

Shultz, who conferred for three hours in London with Jordan’s King Hussein, said his proposal is “the only game in town” because all other peacemaking efforts have broken down.

Asked if he can see any narrowing of differences between Israel and its Arab adversaries concerning the way to get peace talks started, Shultz said, “I can.”

But he added quickly: “I don’t know that I can describe them in any way that would make them perceptible to anybody else. There are possibly some ways to get at it, but we’ll see.”

Nevertheless, Shultz said that all sides in the complex conflict have urged him to continue his mediation effort.

“Nobody has signed up to our proposals, but everybody wants us to keep working, so we’ll keep working,” he said before leaving Tel Aviv.

In their London talks, Shultz and Hussein “reviewed the bidding,” but the monarch made no commitments to either accept or reject the U.S. initiative, a senior State Department official said.

“There are a lot of vital interests at stake in this,” the official said. “They don’t take this lightly, and we don’t expect them to.”

After his talks with Hussein, Shultz flew to Brussels to join President Reagan at a summit meeting today and Thursday of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

U.S. officials said Shultz will probably be back in the Middle East on Friday and Saturday, although Shultz said Reagan will make the final decision on the next step.

Shultz is a former labor negotiator, and he likes to take things slowly, gradually wearing away resistance to his proposals. For this reason, he likes to emphasize that no party has rejected his ideas outright, even though there have been plenty of expressions of skepticism.

Shultz said that as a mediator, he operates “on the tip of the iceberg.” Far more important negotiations go on, he said, beneath the surface, among competing elements in each country.

“This is very complicated because there are so many players,” he said.

The most obvious internal disputes are taking place in Israel, where Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his rightist Likud Bloc oppose key parts of the Shultz proposal, while Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his centrist Labor Alignment seek to encourage the proposal.

According to the British news agency Reuters, Yossi Ben-Aharon, director general of Shamir’s office, told visiting American Jewish leaders Tuesday that the U.S. plan is unacceptable. He predicted that Jordan, too, will turn it down.

Details of the plan have not been officially disclosed. However, it is known to call for a brief period of limited self-rule for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, followed within six months by the start of negotiations over the final status of the territories, which Israel seized in the Six-Day War of 1967.

Shamir has said that Israel is prepared to permit limited self-rule in the territories for a five-year trial period. However, he objects to the Shultz plan because he believes that it moves to final negotiations before the “autonomy” plan could receive a fair trial. In turn, Arab leaders oppose any arrangement that would not move promptly to a final settlement.

“As it stands today, with an early date certain for negotiations on sovereignty, we cannot accept that part of the American concept,” Ben-Aharon said. “We should not be stampeded into discussing sovereignty today. They want us back to the 1967 (border) lines, which is a mortal danger to us.”

Shultz told reporters last week that he was carrying a carefully balanced package proposal that he was unwilling to change in any fundamental way. But he said Tuesday that he has not yet put the proposal into writing, though he plans to do so shortly.

Hussein was the last of the key players in the conflict to meet with Shultz except for the Palestinians. Most residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip say they consider the Palestine Liberation Organization to be their representative, but the United States and Israel refuse to have any dealings with the PLO.

Shultz invited 15 hand-picked Palestinian moderates to a meeting in predominantly Arab East Jerusalem last week. But the Palestinians boycotted the meeting under pressure from the PLO. Shultz said he remains ready to talk to Palestinian representatives, but he said he believes that he has already communicated his views to them.

He said he showed his good faith by agreeing to go to East Jerusalem, “a site where a U.S. secretary of state has never been willing to go before.”

Also, he said, he exerted pressure on Israel to permit two Palestinians--East Jerusalem newspaper editor Hanna Siniora and Gaza lawyer Fayez abu Rahme--to travel to Washington, where they attended a State Department meeting with him last month.

Siniora and Abu Rahme are both strong supporters of the PLO, although they cannot be members of the organization openly because it is outlawed in the Israeli-occupied territory.

Jordanian sources describe the two as “representatives” of the PLO. These sources, familiar with the thinking at the highest levels of the Jordanian government, say that Shultz’s meeting with Siniora and Abu Rahme marked a breakthrough in U.S. relations with the Palestinians.