Baker Tries to Nudge Israel Toward Palestinian Talks

Secretary of State James A. Baker III said Friday that the Middle East peace process would be sent “back to the drawing board” if the Israeli Cabinet does not take steps next week to entice Palestinians to begin a dialogue with Israeli authorities.

Talking to a news conference after a week of intense diplomacy at the United Nations, Baker carefully avoided prescribing in public the action he believes Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government must take. But he said earlier that Israel could break the deadlock by accepting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s 10-point peace proposal.

“The name of the game is, for the first time, to get Israelis and Palestinians talking to each other,” Baker said. “Initially, they should talk about elections and the modalities of the elections.”

Although the comments were carefully crafted to avoid direct criticism of Shamir or his rightist Likud Party, the meaning was inescapable: Unless the Cabinet endorses the Egyptian proposal or finds some other way of bringing Palestinians to the bargaining table, the United States might reconsider its support of Israel’s peace initiative and could settle on a plan much less to Israel’s liking.

Shamir unveiled his plan earlier this year, proposing elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to select Palestinians to negotiate with Israel the terms of limited self-rule.

The plan has gotten nowhere because the Palestinians have refused even to discuss the rules and regulations that would govern the election process. The United States maintains that if Israel endorsed Mubarak’s 10 points, Palestinian leaders would join in preliminary talks. Shamir and his party are reluctant to accept the Mubarak plan, but the centrist Labor Party of Finance Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin supports the approach.

“We’d like to see progress toward peace,” Baker said. “We think that Shamir’s (election) proposal represents the best way to get there. We just hope the Israeli government is as firmly committed to that proposal as it was in the past.”

The news conference marked the end of a round of U.N. diplomacy in which Baker participated in meetings with 46 presidents, foreign ministers and other foreign leaders who were in the United States to attend the General Assembly.

Baker said Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh told him Friday that the Damascus government “wants to be included in any negotiations regarding the Middle East.”

He said he replied that, from the U.S. standpoint, Syria should be represented at any talks concerning the future of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East War and subsequently annexed in an action that has not been recognized by any other country. But the secretary of state made it clear that he believes Syrian participation in the peace process at the present time would only be a distraction.

“The first step is getting Israel and the Palestinians together, and this may be possible without the participation of the government of Syria,” he said.

Baker also defended the Bush Administration’s plan to sell 315 top-of-the-line M1-A1 tanks to Saudi Arabia by describing the deal as part of an effort to improve the security of “moderately oriented Arab governments.”

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said legislation was pending in the Senate to permit Israel to use pre-positioned U.S. military equipment in the event of emergency, a step that could compensate the Jerusalem regime for any damage that the Saudi sale might do to its long-term security interests.

“We might get congressional approval to permit positioning of equipment in Israel for dual use,” Williams said, adding that such arrangements already exist in South Korea and Thailand.

“Those tanks will be purchased by the Saudis,” Baker said. “It’s simply a question of whether they’re going to purchase them from the United States or whether they’re going to go somewhere else.”