Israel’s Ambassador to Egypt Resigns

Israel’s ambassador to Egypt, Shimon Shamir, resigned Tuesday, saying he could not effectively represent the policies of his country’s new right-wing government.

“I felt the platform of the new government was one with which I find it very difficult to identify, and therefore it would be much more effective if that government was represented by someone closer to their views,” said Shamir, who had been a key intermediary in efforts to set up a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians in Cairo.

Shamir, an academic who was appointed Israel’s third ambassador to Egypt in August, 1988, denied that his resignation was a direct response to the new Israeli government’s rejection of the dialogue proposal. He said there are still signs that Israel is moving toward peace with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“It was not a reaction to the situation with the peace process, which has not yet been exhausted,” he said in an interview with The Times. “What I can tell you personally is that I hope very much the way will be found to achieve a breakthrough.”

However, Western diplomats here said that Shamir was recently summoned to Jerusalem to consult on a new communique from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak outlining the new Israeli government’s proposals for advancing the peace process. Though the contents of the letter have not been made public, his resignation followed those consultations, they said.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, quoting unnamed confidants of the ambassador, said Shamir went to the “highest levels” of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to “soften the hard line” of the letter, reportedly drafted by the prime minister’s chief of staff, Yossi Ben-Aharon.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said she was not familiar in detail with the contents of the communique but added that “it spoke about a desire to advance the peace process and said the government is still sticking by its peace initiative of 1989.”

That initiative proposed the election of Palestinian leaders for limited self-rule in the occupied territories, but the proposal became bogged down over procedures to select a Palestinian delegation to hold talks with the Israelis about setting up the elections.

The new government recently rejected many key points of U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s proposal for convening the dialogue, particularly proposals to allow Palestinians deported from the territories or residents of East Jerusalem to act as delegates to the talks.

Ambassador Shamir confirmed that he had consulted on a letter from the prime minister to Mubarak, but he declined to discuss the contents.

“It expressed the views and perceptions of the prime minister about our Egyptian-Israeli relations, the peace process and the situation in the region,” he said.

The ambassador emphasized that he had made his decision to resign at the time the new government was formed by Prime Minister Shamir’s right-wing Likud Party on June 11. He said he delayed submitting it until new Foreign Minister David Levy was discharged from the hospital after a mild heart attack.

“In the U.S., I might point out, all ambassadors resign when there is a new president,” he said. “It’s a matter of harmony that does exist or does not.”

In a separate interview with Israeli government radio, the ambassador said that his resignation “is a matter of my broad outlook, my belief system, of my personal position on questions of domestic and foreign affairs, social, cultural and so on. The present government has a specific platform that I feel I’m not the right person to represent.”