Israel Expects Pressure for Palestinian Talks : Diplomacy: Officials seem resigned to linkage between occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Iraq’s invasion.

Whether the United States succeeds in talking Iraq out of Kuwait peacefully or decides to expel Iraqi troops by force of arms, officials and observers here have concluded that after the Persian Gulf crisis ends, Israel will be pressured to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians on terms that the ruling rightist government has long rejected.

The government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is bracing for such pressure with public warnings that it will not surrender to foreign demands to pull out of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, scene of a three-year-old uprising against Israeli rule.

“Israel has successfully resisted international pressure in the past,” Shamir said in a radio broadcast, suggesting that the nation would do so in the future.

In effect, Israel has become resigned to the creeping linkage between the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and its own hold on the occupied lands. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has repeatedly insisted that no solution to the Kuwait issue can come about without a simultaneous resolution of the Palestinian conflict.

Although in its dealings with Iraq the Bush Administration has rejected any link between the two disputes, some European governments have proposed that once Iraq withdraws from Kuwait, world attention would turn to getting Israeli troops to leave the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Let us not be naive,” advised Foreign Minister David Levy during a weekend Cabinet meeting. “While the United States and other countries oppose linkage, as they should, a psychological linkage has been created.

“In the post-crisis period, international elements will demand that Israel enter into a comprehensive peace process for the region, and we must be prepared for this.”

Talks scheduled for Wednesday between Iraq’s Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz and U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III are being eyed suspiciously by Israelis.

“We believe the Americans when they say there will be no secret negotiations, no linkage,” wrote the Hadashot newspaper in an editorial. “But still, there is a strange feeling in the stomach.”

Talks hold two major risks for Israel, observers contend. First, if Iraq leaves Kuwait without war, its conventional arsenal, chemical weaponry and potential for nuclear arms development would be intact, remaining a threat to the region at large and to Israel in particular.

“Success in the conflict with Saddam Hussein has to mean more than getting him out of Kuwait,” argued Joseph Alpher, a defense analyst at Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. “It has to mean a defanging operation, seriously cutting down to size the Iraqi military-industrial potential, and beyond that, getting rid of Saddam’s regime.”

In addition, an Iraqi retreat would set an example for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. The stage will be set for an international conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a negotiating process that Israel opposes.

Israeli officials say that in an international conference under U.N. auspices, they would be outnumbered by delegates sympathetic to the Palestine Liberation Organization and its demand for an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza.

In the minds of some Israeli observers, Israel has invited global intervention by its refusal to make peace moves with the Palestinians. It would be better if Israel itself proposed a solution that would preempt outside moves, they say.

“We should most emphatically not await the end of a crisis, which will only make things far worse for us. We should make the most unexpected move,” urged Arieh Yaari of the Tel Aviv-based International Center for Peace in the Middle East in an article in the Jerusalem Post newspaper.