Shamir Gets Deadline on Peace Talks

Israeli Labor Party ministers today gave Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir one day to accept a U.S. plan for peace talks with Palestinians or see the coalition government collapse.

“In practical terms, by tomorrow the issue must be decided,” Energy Minister Moshe Shahal said after an emergency party meeting of Labor Cabinet ministers.

The country’s 12-member policy-making inner Cabinet is due to hold the decisive debate Wednesday.

“If there will not be a vote or if the vote goes against a positive response to the (U.S.) questions, it will mean the end of the national unity government,” Shahal said.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the pivotal figure in the unity government, told reporters after the meeting, “I see an urgent need in convening the inner Cabinet and taking a decision.”

An angry Rabin said he completely rejected demands that Shamir’s rightist Likud Party made Monday as conditions for joining Cairo peace talks proposed by Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

If Shamir fails Wednesday to agree to the holding of the first Israeli-Palestinian peace talks ever, the dovish Labor Party could call at a regular weekly meeting Thursday for the party to quit the 15-month-old government.

A general party meeting would have to approve a formal decision and ministers said this could be held one week after the deadline to Shamir.

Shamir’s Likud on Monday demanded Labor support an Israeli position that would exclude the 140,000 East Jerusalem Arabs from Palestinian elections, which the peace talks are supposed to arrange.

It also wanted a guarantee that Labor would agree to the talks being broken off if Palestinian negotiators said they represented the Palestine Liberation Organization, branded by Israel as a terrorist group.

Labor had already agreed to East Jerusalem Palestinians voting and said it did not care whom the Palestinian negotiators consulted.

Israel seized East Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan River from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East war.

Labor leader Vice Premier Shimon Peres said Likud had effectively rejected Baker’s formula for talks with Palestinians to implement the Israeli May 14 plan for elections in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The United States publicly asked last week for Shamir to decide on the talks. But instead, a five-hour Likud meeting Monday night produced new demands on his Labor coalition partners before going ahead with the Cairo talks.

Labor leaders denounced the Likud terms as an attempt to question their commitment to holding all of Jerusalem. Labor ministers Tuesday reaffirmed their support for an undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.