MIDEAST PEACE / A JUMP START THAT FAILED : Talks Stalled Despite Egypt’s Effort

Egyptian officials, frustrated and more than a little nervous over the recent deadlock in efforts to negotiate a peace settlement in the Middle East, have concluded a furious week of diplomacy aimed at jump-starting a process almost everyone else was ready to pronounce dead.

After a hurried round of meetings in Washington, New York and Rome, Egyptian Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid returned home at the beginning of the week hopeful but with little to show for his effort to restart the 18-month-old dialogue between the United States and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Publicly, Egyptian officials are expressing optimism about prospects for resuming the dialogue, which was suspended June 20, and opening the path toward peace negotiations with Israel. Privately, they are glum. “When he left,” one official said of Meguid’s U.S. visit, “Washington was saying it would resume the (PLO) dialogue under two conditions. Now I see they tell him they will resume the dialogue under three conditions. Now it’s three conditions? This is progress?”

Abdel Monem Said, a senior Egyptian public policy analyst, said: “Of course, they are trying to patch things up, play for time. Everyone is looking at Egypt because Egypt is simply the only one that’s trying to communicate with everybody. But the fact is we have no peace process right now, and when there is no peace process, anything can happen.”

Meguid and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s top political policy adviser, Osama Baz, met with President Bush and top State Department officials in what Egyptian officials said was an attempt to persuade Washington to restart the dialogue with the PLO and to present possible new mechanisms for getting the peace process going again, including convening the U.S.-PLO dialogue in Cairo rather than in Tunis.

What Washington Wants

U.S. officials have said they will not resume the dialogue until the PLO condemns an unsuccessful terrorist raid by a PLO faction on Israeli beaches near Tel Aviv and takes steps against Abul Abbas, the guerrilla leader who organized it.

Arab sources said Meguid did reach agreement on a plan for Egypt to act as an intermediary in trying to get the PLO to fall into line. The plan calls for urging PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to drop Abbas from the PLO executive committee, to condemn Abbas’ Palestine Liberation Front for carrying out the raid and to reduce the PLF’s status within the PLO.

Those terms are somewhat milder than, but substantially similar to, the original U.S. conditions for restarting the dialogue. But they do allow the Egyptians to carry U.S. assurances that if they are met, the dialogue will be resumed immediately.

Whether they will provide the leverage Arafat needs to satisfy increasingly vocal PLO radicals, who have opposed any condemnation of Abbas, remains to be seen. Arafat’s chief spokesman, Bassam abu Sharif, declined to speculate.

The Traveling Egyptian

After his talks in Washington, Meguid went to New York to see U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, and then on to Rome to meet with Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the incoming head of the European Community, and with Pope John Paul II. He came home with blessings and presumably some encouragement, but still no active peace process. The essential problem, those closest to the efforts say, is that Egypt and other Arab states have not been successful in persuading Washington, especially in an election year, to exert more pressure on Israel’s new right-wing government to move forward toward peace. During the diplomatic flurry, Israel Radio reported that Bush had sent Meguid home with a proposal that President Mubarak meet directly with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to try to break the deadlock. Shamir said he hadn’t heard anything about it, but responded enthusiastically to Egypt’s attempts to intervene.

“Only such a leader as Mubarak, popular among all his people and a resident of the Middle East, will be able to work jointly with the state of Israel to advance peace,” Shamir said Monday. By midweek, nearly everyone was discounting prospects for an Egyptian-Israeli summit--and the ball was back in Washington.

On Wednesday, Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy disclosed two of the conditions on which Israel is insisting in order to advance the peace process: that the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state and will not “impose” the PLO on Israel. Both are certain to meet brick walls on the Arab side.

Mubarak this week expressed optimism that the Bush Administration would come through with a progressive solution. Many Egyptians scoffed.

“He knows there is a rising anti-American feeling in the country, and he would like to soften it,” one official said. “Frankly, we need a crisis. Without a crisis, I don’t know how things can start up again.”