Baker Stands Firm on Mideast Peace Plan : Diplomacy: The secretary praises Israel’s acceptance of his five-point proposal. But he won’t accept new conditions.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III said Wednesday that the United States rejected Israeli conditions for Middle East peace talks even before Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Cabinet formally adopted them this week.

But Baker said he is prepared to continue in his role of Arab-Israeli mediator and is now awaiting a response from Egypt to the demands made Sunday by the Israeli government.

With Shamir scheduled to visit Washington next week, Baker sought to adopt a generally conciliatory tone. He praised the Israeli government for accepting in principle his five-point peace proposal. But he did nothing to disguise his objections to the conditions the Israelis attached to their action.

“The action of the Israeli Cabinet, I think, is a very positive step,” Baker told reporters on the flight home from meetings in Australia. “It is, however, only the first step in what might be a very long and complicated process. It will be a first step only if we are able to continue to make progress, and that will depend on what we hear from the Egyptians.”

It seems unlikely that Egypt, which has assumed the role of surrogate for the Palestine Liberation Organization in the preliminary talks with Baker, will react favorably to the Israeli conditions, which were designed to cut the PLO out of the bargaining process.

Israel’s so-called Inner Cabinet voted 9 to 3 Sunday to accept in principle Baker’s peace initiative. But it demanded assurances that no representative of the PLO will take part in negotiations and that the talks will be limited to the details of Israel’s proposal for elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Baker said the conditions are nothing new and that he had refused to approve them before the Cabinet vote. He seemed to leave little doubt that he still opposes the Israeli demands, although he asserted that the Israeli action is still under study in Washington.

Israeli officials said Shamir’s government is no longer asking that Baker change the wording of his plan. Rather, it is demanding private assurances from Baker that the United States will support the Israeli position on the PLO and the agenda for talks.

Baker said that if he were to provide such assurances, it would not be a secret deal.

“We have made it clear to both Israelis and Egyptians that to the extent that we are asked for any kind of private assurances, that each side will know the exact nature of the assurances that we provide the other side,” he said.

Baker called on all parties to the dispute to forget for the time being their substantive plans for a final settlement and to focus on ways of getting Israelis and Palestinians to begin talking with each other.

“It is our hope,” he said, “that the action by the Israeli Cabinet will help us move toward establishment of a dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis, because that is a fundamental first step if there is to be progress toward peace in the Middle East. We have been encouraging Israelis and Egyptians and Palestinians to find ways to take that first step without preventing that by focusing initially on bottom-line positions.”

Neither side appears ready to do that, however. Both Israel and the PLO are demanding assurances that the outcome will be satisfactory before agreeing to begin talks.

Israel refuses to deal with the PLO, which it considers a terrorist organization. But most Palestinians--and all Arab states--recognize the organization as the only representative of the Palestinians.

At the White House, spokesman Roman Popadiuk said there is still “nothing firm” on whether President Bush will meet with Shamir when he visits Washington. The Administration has been noncommittal on a possible meeting for weeks, using it as a way of putting pressure on Israel to agree to the Baker plan.