Baker Heading Back to Mideast for New Round : Diplomacy: Secretary hopes to take advantage of ‘window of opportunity’ for forging peace in region.

Increasingly concerned that the postwar chance for Middle East peace may not last long, Secretary of State James A. Baker III leaves today for a trip to Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and probably Jordan, just four days after returning from his last visit to the region.

“None of us knows how long the window of opportunity is going to exist, and you do not want to somehow inadvertently miss an opportunity that may well be there,” State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said Monday in announcing Baker’s travel plans.

She said that the only way to cope with “anything that is this difficult and this intractable is in person.”

She added that Baker and President Bush “are convinced that all parties are taking a serious approach to peace in the Middle East.” But, she added, “there is much work to be done, many questions to be answered, and still a long way to go.”

Baker returned late Friday from a week of talks with most of the same people he will meet this time. On the earlier trip, Baker said that he was searching for possible areas of agreement. This time, U.S. officials said, he hopes to get more specific.

In Jerusalem, Israeli officials said they understand that Baker’s primary purpose is to demand concessions from them that would permit the early convening of a regional peace conference. Israel agreed last week that it would attend such a conference, to be headed by the United States and the Soviet Union and attended by all parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

According to Israeli officials, Baker plans to press Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to agree to at least a temporary halt in the construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip as a show of good faith. Washington has long considered settlement activity to be an obstacle to an ultimate peace settlement.

The Israeli officials said that Baker also will press Israel to agree that U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in 1967 at the end of the Six-Day War, requires at least a partial Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. The resolution calls for Israel to surrender territory it occupied during the conflict, but the Shamir government maintains that, by returning to Egypt the Sinai Peninsula--the other territory captured in 1967--Israel has already complied and is under no obligation to yield more occupied land. The official U.S. position is that the resolution applies to “all fronts.”

Israeli newspapers also reported that Baker will try to persuade Shamir to permit Palestinians to be seated at the proposed conference as an independent delegation rather than as part of the delegation of an Arab nation.

There is little doubt that Baker will raise all of those points because they have been key elements of Washington’s approach to Middle East peace for years. But Baker’s purpose in returning to the region less than 100 hours after the end of his last visit seems to be to show that Washington is doing everything possible to achieve a settlement. If the effort fails, it seems clear that Baker wants to demonstrate that it was not because he was unwilling to press to the maximum extent.

Baker plans to stop in Luxembourg on Wednesday for talks with European Community leaders. But his first stop in the Middle East will be in Israel. If he is able to pry any concessions from Shamir, Baker then would be in a position to demand reciprocal gestures from the Arabs.

Baker is certain to visit Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Tutwiler said that a stop in Jordan is still under consideration. In previous years, a U.S. secretary of state would certainly pay a call on Jordan’s King Hussein, for decades Washington’s closest ally in the Arab world. But the Bush Administration, still angry at the monarch for tilting toward Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, wants to underline the chill in Washington-Amman relations without banishing Jordan from the peace process. A stable peace without Jordan, the Arab nation with the longest border with Israel, would seem impossible.

The Shamir government shows no sign of stopping the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Shamir himself likened the expansion to a natural process, as if they had sprouted on their own.

“There is life,” he said. “So there are developments.”

Kempster reported from Washington and Williams from Jerusalem.