U.S. Presses Shamir for Vote Details, Israelis Say

The Bush Administration is pressing for details of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Palestinian election proposal, Israeli officials said Thursday.

They said the Americans are reminding the Israelis of U.S. insistence that Israel give up occupied land in return for overall peace.

In a letter delivered 10 days ago, Secretary of State James A. Baker III requested that the Israeli election proposal include a “significant link” to a final outcome of peace negotiations, the Israeli officials said.

The letter also included a request for details on international supervision of the elections and whether Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1967, would be allowed to vote.

Affirms U.S. Pressure

The letter apparently affirms Washington’s intention to extract a commitment to the land-for-peace formula from a reluctant Shamir government. Shamir’s Likud Party, the dominant partner in the ruling coalition, is adamantly opposed to such a commitment.

Shamir views elections as a means of setting up a period of self-rule, under Israeli authority, for the 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

U.S. Embassy officials in Tel Aviv confirmed that a letter had been delivered but declined to reveal its contents. A delegation of State Department experts on the Middle East is expected to arrive Sunday. The delegation, led by Dennis Ross, head of the State Department’s policy planning staff, will come from Moscow, where on Wednesday and Thursday Baker conferred with Soviet officials.

Key ministers of the Israeli government have been wrestling with the details of an election proposal since Shamir broached the plan last month in Washington. Foreign Minister Moshe Arens responded to Baker’s letter by saying that details are still being worked out.

Arens is scheduled to leave for Washington on Monday night, to be followed a few days later by Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Rabin and Finance Minister Shimon Peres, members of the Labor Party, the junior partner in government, both favor giving up at least some of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for peace with the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors. Shamir and Arens are both opposed.

‘A Real Red Line’

“This disagreement can kill the whole idea,” Alon Liel, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said. “This is a real red line for Arens and Shamir. The government--the whole public--is divided on this issue.”

Liel said Israel may try to convince Washington that a step-by-step program, including elections, should go forward without a clear Israeli commitment to give up land. Shamir proposed the elections as a means for Palestinians to choose delegates to arrange a five-year period of limited self-rule in the occupied lands. He has stopped short of linking the vote to a final settlement.

An official in the Foreign Ministry said that supervision of the elections is not considered a problem because Israel would freely let diplomats and visitors observe the vote. But the question of letting East Jerusalem residents vote, he said, is stickier.

Israel cannot be seen as surrendering sovereignty over part of Jerusalem, which it claims as its undivided capital. Some formula might be worked out under which Arabs in East Jerusalem might vote by absentee ballot delivered to the adjacent West Bank, “but this is far from solved,” he said.

A top official in Shamir’s office sought to minimize the importance of Baker’s letter.

“It merely impressed upon us the need to make the elections as attractive as possible so that Palestinians deem it important,” said Yossi Ben-Aharon, a top aide to the prime minister.

Ben-Aharon said that details of the election plan will be worked out in the “immediate future.” Reports of the letter that have appeared in Israeli newspapers, he said, were the result of “twisted leaks” by officials trying to get their own points of view across.

Gradually Invoking Limits

Since Shamir’s return from Washington, he has been gradually putting limits on what Palestinian representatives elected under his plan would be permitted to talk about.

Tuesday, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Shamir said that before a vote can be held, a “body” of Palestinians will have to agree to accept a five-year autonomy scheme and nothing else.

“They can’t come after the elections and declare, ‘We constitute the independent regime here, and we say so and so,’ ” Shamir said. “This will be a gross infringement of the agreement and this will give us the right--indeed, it will obligate us--to do away with the whole process.”

Shamir suggested that Egypt and Jordan could sit in with Palestinians who might agree to such terms, although he declined to say how such a Palestinian body would be chosen.

In the Jerusalem Post interview, Shamir ruled out any participation by East Jerusalem Arabs and said that “my opposition is adamant.”

Several prominent Arab activists live in East Jerusalem and would probably be elected to a Palestinian peace delegation.

Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have rejected Shamir’s proposal because it does not link elections with eventual Palestinian independence. They see it as an effort to halt the Arab uprising, which has brought the Palestinian demand for independence into public view.

“To go to elections would kill us,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, who heads a Palestinian research institute in East Jerusalem.

The Palestine Liberation Organization also dismisses elections as an effort to keep the PLO out of peace talks.