Baker Walks a Tangled Trail in Quest for Talks : Middle East: Arabs and Israelis are maneuvering to turn the peace process to their own advantage.

After Secretary of State James A. Baker III finished five exhausting hours negotiating with Syrian President Hafez Assad this week, he puckishly described the talks by twisting his hands through the air in a belly dancer’s serpentine wave.

The message came without words, but its import was clear: The Syrians, like the other Arabs and the Israelis whom Baker met this week, are using every maneuver they know to try to turn the Bush Administration’s new Middle East peace process to their advantage, and they all know quite a few.

Baker spent his second weeklong journey through the region in a month trying to cajole the Arabs and Israelis into a peace conference where they can negotiate directly over issues that have kept them at war for 43 years.

From Jerusalem to Cairo and Damascus, he won effusive endorsements of the basic idea--and a swarm of conditions, questions and comments that made it clear the two sides are still far apart on matters of substance.

In Israel, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said he was certainly ready to sit down at a U.S.-sponsored peace conference, but his aides insisted that there would be no talk of any Israeli withdrawals from occupied territory. In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak said he, too, was ready to talk peace, but issued a position paper insisting that the Palestinians must have the right to an Palestinian state, something Israel has long rejected.

Even Syria, Israel’s most intractable enemy, said it fully accepted the principle of direct negotiations with the Jewish state--but added that the talks must lead to the enforcement of U.N. resolutions that call for Israeli withdrawals from occupied territories.

“It was agreed that all the parties concerned should seek a comprehensive and just peace in the region based on United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338, and that a peace conference (should) be held in order to implement these U.N. resolutions,” Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh said Friday.

“Our understanding is that . . . (the conference) would not impose anything outside the scope and the formula of the U.N. Security Council resolutions,” he added.

In this landscape tangled with ancient complications, Baker is attempting to revive the traditional American art of shuttle diplomacy, confident that the ground has changed since the decline of the Soviet Union--the traditional ally of the radical Arab states--and the joint American-Arab triumph in the Persian Gulf War.

“Things really are different now,” a Baker aide said.

Indeed, both Israel and the Arabs have shown new flexibility--at least on matters of form and procedure.

Syria, for example, pointedly dropped its previous insistence that any peace conference had to be held explicitly under the authority of the U.N. Security Council, a demand that Israel has long resisted for fear that the council would favor the Arabs.

Both sides also reached a compromise on the key procedural issue of Resolution 242, a bone of contention for many years. The Arabs interpret 242 as requiring a complete Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in the 1967 Middle East War; Shamir’s government contends that Israel has already fulfilled the resolution’s requirement by returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1979.

Under a formula proposed by Baker, a State Department official said, Israel and the Arabs have agreed to negotiate on the basis of Resolution 242--and to set aside, for now, the fact that they disagree over what the document means.

That gambit was typical of Baker’s approach: The secretary of state appears to be staking his initiative on his success in arranging a peace conference--and to serve that goal, he has had to postpone the harder work of resolving issues of substance.

Baker betrayed some impatience Friday with the endless haggling he has had to endure on issues of procedure and terminology, such as whether the conference would be an “international conference” (as the Arabs have demanded) or a “regional meeting” (as Israel insists).

“Do you know what’s important here? Substance. Substance is important, not form,” he told a news conference. “Names are not as important as whether or not there is truly a desire on the part of the parties to this conflict to seek true reconciliation.”

Still, as a Baker aide noted, “In the Middle East, process and substance are the same thing.”

Indeed, in Arab-Israeli negotiations, matters of process and procedure have a way of becoming central--mostly because they go to two issues at the heart of the conflict: Arab recognition of Israel’s nationhood and Israeli acceptance of Palestinian national rights.

The first and only time a U.N.-sponsored Middle East peace conference was attempted, at Geneva in 1973, the meeting collapsed in less than a day because of squabbles over where Israel’s delegation would sit.

When then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz tried his hand at shuttle diplomacy in 1988, the initiative foundered because Israel and the Palestinians could not agree on who should represent the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

And when Baker himself attempted to implement Shamir’s own plan for elections in the occupied territories last year, the proposal collapsed over the same issue.

The question of how the Palestinians should be represented at the conference remains unsolved today, U.S. and Arab officials said.

“That’s a major problem that they’ve got to work out,” noted William B. Quandt, a Middle East expert at Washington’s Brookings Institution who worked on the successful Camp David peace conference between Israel and Egypt in 1979.

Quandt said simply getting a peace conference started would constitute a major achievement--precisely because the procedural issues have been insuperable before.

“If you can get the Palestinians, Jordan and Syria to sit across a table from Israel and negotiate directly, you will have crossed a divide,” he said. “You’d have a kind of explicit Arab recognition of Israel--and Israeli recognition of the Palestinians--that you’ve never had before.”

The problem, he added, is what comes next.

“The substantive issues are still extremely difficult,” he said. “Henry Kissinger used the Geneva Conference in 1973 very cleverly, because he already had worked out the next steps. When he went to Geneva, he knew he had the first Sinai disengagement agreement (between Israeli and Egyptian forces) ready to go. I don’t think Baker has the agreements lined up yet.”

Indeed, Baker and his aides have been working for weeks to persuade Israel and the Arabs to implement “confidence-building measures”--relatively modest steps to improve the atmosphere between the two sides--and have come up empty-handed.

On one key “confidence-building” issue, the longstanding U.S. demand that Israel stop building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the Administration appears to have lost ground. Officials in Israel said this week that they plan to go ahead with a project to build 14,000 new housing units in Arab-populated areas, despite a promise by Shamir to Baker that no such decision has been made.

A senior U.S. official, frustrated by the Israelis’ stony refusal to soften on the settlements issue, indicated that Baker will attempt to work around the problem.

“The settlements are out there as an issue,” he said. “This will not be the only complicating issue.”

Noting that he had worked on Shultz’s abortive peace initiative in 1988, the official offered a comparison: “Then, no one wanted to be blamed for the breakdown--but no one was looking for a way to make something happen. Now, the sense I have is they’re all looking for a way to make something happen. . . . I see a different potential, I see a different psychology and I see a different set of intentions.”

Whether or not that is enough to guarantee success, Baker appeared to be preparing for another negotiating trip to the Middle East in the next few weeks--and, perhaps, another after that.

“We’re not going to solve it with one trip or even two trips overnight,” Baker said. “The name of the game now is to keep working on those issues and pushing them and seeing if we can contribute to bringing the parties together.”

The secretary of state has been careful to caution that nothing may come of the effort. But the man he works for, President Bush, has picked the Arab-Israeli dispute as the one foreign policy issue where he wants to make a mark this year.

“We’ve got a shot now, and we’re going to try our level best,” Bush said last week. “And we really feel it. This is something we feel very passionately about.”

On Friday, with his Mideast trip completed, Baker headed home, stopping off in Geneva for a few hours. While there, he met with Jordanian Foreign Minister Taher Masri in the first high-level meeting between officials of the two countries since the Gulf War, when Jordan incurred U.S. anger by backing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Masri said Jordan, like the other Arab countries, supported the U.S. idea of a conference and was willing to attend as part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. But he added that such a move, which would assuage Israeli objections to a Palestinian delegation, was up to the Palestinians.

Bush formally cut off U.S. aid to Jordan only this week, when legislation halting the $55-million-per-year aid program reached his desk.

But Baker pointedly noted before his meeting with Masri that the law gave the White House “flexibility” to restore the aid if it decides that Jordan is cooperating with U.S. peace efforts.