Shamir Impatient as U.S. Fails to Break Off PLO Talks : Israel: The prime minister also emphasizes his policy of increasing the number of Jewish residents in the occupied areas.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir expressed impatience Monday with the reluctance of the Bush Administration to break off talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization over an abortive guerrilla raid.

Shamir also said it is the policy of his new government to increase the numbers of Jewish residents in existing settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But he suggested that no new settlements would be built in the foreseeable future, government radio reported, although the principle of colonizing the Israeli-held land remains in effect.

“More important now is to take care of the existing settlements, to develop them, to advance their population,” Shamir said.

Shamir has pressed for suspension of the U.S.-PLO talks since they began in December, 1988, and his campaign was given new life by the failed attack by a PLO faction on the Israeli shoreline May 30.

The Bush Administration characterized the raid as a terror attack and demanded that the PLO not only condemn it but expel its architect, Mohammed Abbas, alias Abul Abbas, who is a member of the PLO executive committee.

So far, the PLO has stopped short of condemning the raid, by the Palestine Liberation Front, and made it clear that Abul Abbas will not be expelled under pressure from Washington.

Shamir wants the United States to make good on its threat to end the talks. Under terms set by the Reagan Administration, contact with the PLO depended on the group’s abandonment of terror tactics.

“We were sure that no one in the United States would dare to say to us that again this time they have doubts,” Shamir told a group of high school students in the city of Petah Tikva. “What do we see? Week after week passes and they are still holding consultations, there in the political offices in the United States, about whether indeed the PLO is still a terrorist organization.”

Shamir’s statement is the latest round of critical exchanges between the two governments. Last week, Secretary of State James A. Baker III urged Shamir to take up his offer to start peace talks with Palestinians. Shamir has refused because the Bush Administration plan would give an offstage role to the PLO, which is demanding the formation of a Palestinian state next to Israel.

In Washington, U.S. officials said Monday that President Bush, in a letter, has called on Shamir to explain what he is willing to do to revive peace efforts. The letter, which included a conciliatory note of congratulations on the formation of a new Israeli government, said Bush hopes Shamir remains committed to his own plan of last year, which called for elections of Palestinian representatives in the occupied areas.

Shamir is at the head of a newly formed right-wing government and has been trying to shift the focus of its diplomacy from the question of Israel’s rule over 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the country’s relations with the Arab world at large.

In his remarks in Petah Tikva, Shamir repeated that his government program gives full priority to the successful immigration of Soviet Jews.

Shamir also invited Syria’s president, Hafez Assad, to come to Jerusalem and talk peace. Syria is demanding return of the Golan Heights, which Israel won while repelling a joint Arab invasion in 1967 and annexed 14 years later.

“If the Syrian president wants to come to Israel for talks with us without preconditions, we will meet him and welcome him,” Shamir said.

Last March, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter delivered a message from Assad indicating the Syrian president’s willingness to hold peace talks, although such negotiations would “obviously include the Golan Heights.”

The foreign policy transition in the new Shamir government began roughly, with complaints from the new Foreign Minister David Levy that Shamir is dealing with Washington without consulting him. According to Israeli newspaper reports, an aide to Shamir told Bush Administration officials that talks with Palestinians under Baker’s plan are out of the question.

In retaliation, Levy blocked delivery of a letter to Egyptian officials through Israel’s embassy in Cairo, the newspaper Haaretz reported.

A spokesman for Levy said the flap was “blown out of proportion.”