King Hussein Revives Israel Peace Talks Idea

Jordan’s King Hussein, reclaiming a once-promising idea from the Middle East scrap heap, said Thursday that he is ready to form a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to talk peace with Israel.

Once the heart of a U.S.-backed initiative to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict, the plan is intended to provide a Palestinian presence at the negotiating table without forcing Israel to sit down with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization--something the Jerusalem government refuses to do.

That approach was generally acceptable to Israel the last time around, and it enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz. The Palestinians, after once tentatively accepting the idea, ultimately refused to go along. However, officials believe that they may be more amenable now.

Although seemingly technical and arcane, the dispute over Palestinian representation has destroyed every attempt at Arab-Israeli peacemaking since the Camp David conference ended a dozen ago. It is, a former diplomat said, a “hall of mirrors” that would-be peacemakers must find their way through before they can even begin to talk about the substance of the conflict.

“I’m not surprised that the Jordanian option has risen from the dead,” said Michael Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington. “You have to look at how the Palestinians will view this. I would think that the PLO is ready to look for new modalities and new ways of thinking--even if they happen actually to be old ones.”

During an exploratory trip to the Middle East that ended early Sunday, Secretary of State James A. Baker III said he hopes to move quickly to take advantage of the “window of opportunity” resulting from the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf War. He said when he returned that he would telephone Arab and Israeli leaders this week to suggest concrete measures to revive the moribund peace process.

But the process is already starting to bog down. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday that Baker has not yet begun his consultations, although lower-ranking diplomats are exploring the issue. That gave the Jordanian monarch an opening to make the first move, albeit a familiar one.

“In 1985 we had an agreement which . . . we might look at again,” Hussein said in an interview with NBC-TV’s “Today” show. It was “to have a joint delegation on which we shall put the Palestinians . . . in the front row to speak on the Palestinian-Israeli dimension of the problem while we deal with the Jordanian-Israeli aspect of it.”

The objective is to cut the Gordian knot of PLO participation. Israel labels the PLO a terrorist organization and refuses to deal directly with it, but the Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip insist that the PLO is their only legitimate representative. Israel has tried for years without success to begin a dialogue with representative Palestinians outside of PLO auspices.

U.S. officials believe that the PLO has been so weakened by its open support of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War that it will have to settle for far less than it had hoped to get when it turned down the earlier proposal for a joint delegation with Jordan. This time the Jordanian option may be the best the PLO can expect to get.

Georgetown’s Hudson agreed that the PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat will be flexible on the issue.

“Arafat’s big decision to embrace Saddam Hussein was uncharacteristic,” he said. “One of my Palestinian colleagues, who is no fan of Arafat’s, said that Arafat has been famous for being indecisive. The one time he should have been indecisive, he made a decision, and it was the wrong one.”

U.S. officials say that the emphasis must be on form rather than substance for the time being. If the technical issues like Palestinian representation cannot be settled, they say, nothing else can even be tried.

Baker’s approach is to encourage Israel to negotiate simultaneously with the Palestinians and with neighboring Arab states. That plan is supposed to balance the pluses and minuses on both sides.

Israel wants to negotiate with Arab governments because such talks would convey recognition of Israel’s legitimacy as a state. The Jerusalem government has long sought normal peaceful relations with its neighbors. With the exception of Egypt, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, no Arab government has established diplomatic relations with Israel.

For their part, the Arab states are in no hurry to engage in government-to-government relations with Israel. But all Arab governments pay at least lip service to Palestinian rights, demanding that Israel acquiesce in Palestinian self-determination.

Baker has concluded that the Arabs will not normalize relations with Israel unless progress is made at the same time on Palestinian rights, while Israel will not yield on the Palestinians without obtaining formal recognition from the Arab governments.

Jordan’s Hussein indicated that his government is ready for such a trade-off. The Hashemite monarch clearly hopes to repair relations with Washington that were badly damaged during the war, when Jordan sympathized with Iraq.

As a demonstration of its anger with Jordan, the Senate voted Wednesday to cut off all foreign aid to that country. The Administration earlier had suspended aid to Jordan, but the White House objected strongly to the Senate action on the grounds that it would reduce the U.S. government’s flexibility in dealing with Amman.

Hussein conceded that his relationship with Washington had suffered badly, but he said that he hopes it can be refurbished soon.

“Now things have gone wrong, and I believe that there is still a lot of misunderstanding that will be cleared up in the time ahead,” he said.

BACKGROUND

The Middle East peace initiative advanced by Secretary of State George P. Shultz three years ago proposed an interim period of limited self-rule for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip while negotiations proceeded over the shape of a final settlement. Instead of a five-year period of self-rule, as set out in the 1979 Camp David peace treaty, the Shultz plan aimed for local elections and limited autonomy in the occupied territories within months. The plan called for negotiations, expected to last six months or less, between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Although Jordan and the Arab states had demanded talks attended by the major powers and all of the parties to the dispute, Shultz tried to finesse the issue of a conference. His plan called for an advisory role for the major powers, although they could not impose a settlement and would not have a veto. The conference was to meet at the start of talks and reconvene from time to time during Arab-Israeli negotiations.