Roadblocks Remain to Peace: Baker : Mideast: But he expresses guarded confidence as his six-day mission ends. And he leaves Jerusalem with some concessions from Shamir.

Armed with new--but apparently inconclusive--concessions from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Secretary of State James A. Baker III said Thursday that Middle East peace is possible but still a long way off.

With Shamir standing at his side outside the prime minister’s office, Baker admitted that the two main stumbling blocks that were in the way of a proposed regional peace conference when he began his trip last week were still in place when he ended it six days and more than 13,800 miles later.

Nevertheless, he said he is not ready to give up. He hinted strongly that he will return to the region, although perhaps at a somewhat slower pace than his present record of four trips in 10 weeks.

A senior Bush Administration official said Shamir revised his earlier hard-line stance a bit, giving Baker something new to work with in his effort to bring Syria and other Arab governments to the conference table. But the official quickly added that the concessions “are not as much as I . . . would have liked to have had.”

The official, who talked to reporters on the understanding that he would not be identified by name, refused to disclose the nature of the Israeli compromises. But he said Baker expects to seek reciprocal concessions from President Hafez Assad of Syria, King Hussein of Jordan and other Arab leaders.

On the basis of the talks in Jerusalem, the official said, Baker will be able to go to the Arab leaders and say, “Now look, here are the things that I can guarantee you Israel will do.”

He said it would be “counterproductive” to make any of the agreements public until they are discussed with the Arabs.

Baker met for three hours Thursday with Shamir, Foreign Minister David Levy and Defense Minister Moshe Arens after three meetings Wednesday that totaled nearly five hours.

At the end of the meetings, conducted in an atmosphere that Levy admitted was “sometimes not all that good,” Baker claimed to have gained a much clearer understanding of the areas of agreement and disagreement between Israel and the neighboring Arab countries over the arrangements for a peace conference.

He said he will report to President Bush today, “and we will together . . . decide what our next steps are.”

“I think we have a much clearer and much better understanding of the range of agreement . . . as well as a much clearer and better understanding of the few areas (in) . . . which there is still disagreement,” Baker said.

Meanwhile, the senior official said Baker and the Israelis have settled on a formula that promises to end the dispute over Palestinian representation, which has scuttled proposed Middle East peace plans going back for a decade or more.

“We (may) have something on that issue . . . that can be made to work,” the official said.

He refused to go into details, although he said the formula would be best applied to selection of Palestinian members of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. However, he said that if Jordan refuses to participate, the plan for Palestinian representation might still be usable.

The official was asked if the Palestinian formula would make it possible to hold a scaled-down conference, limited primarily to the dispute between Israel and the Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, if Syria refuses to participate.

“We started out with the broadest approach,” the official said. “We’ve always known that something short of that was perhaps possible if you couldn’t do the broad approach . . . (But) I do not want to write off the effort to include Syria.”

Essentially, the dispute over arrangements for a conference is between Israel and Syria. If those two governments agreed to attend, Jordan and the Palestinians would certainly follow suit. Egypt is the only country, so far, to have said it will attend no matter how the remaining issues are settled.

In Washington, the White House announced Thursday that President Bush telephoned King Hussein to discuss the peace process with him. It was the first direct contact between the two leaders since August, when the king visited Bush at the President’s summer residence in Kennebunkport, Me.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater declined to release any specifics about the conversation, saying only that the two discussed “all the relevant issues.” Hussein told Bush he remains interested in the U.S. proposal for a Middle East peace conference, “but there was no commitment to actually participate.”

Bush and Baker are expected to meet today at the White House to discuss their next move.

Describing the remaining disagreements over the peace conference, Baker said: “There remains to be resolved the question of the role, if any, of the United Nations in the process, and the question of the extent to which any conference might reconvene with the consent of all the parties.”

He had used almost identical language in outlining the differences last Sunday after he completed an apparently fruitless meeting with Assad in Damascus, so his comments Thursday make it clear that very little progress was made in the last week.

According to Israeli press reports, Shamir announced that he would accept a representative of the U.N. secretary general as an observer at the conference without giving him the right to speak. The reports said Shamir also would permit the conference to reconvene after nine months solely to receive progress reports.

In the past, Israel had insisted that there be no role of any sort for the United Nations, which Israel considers to be biased in favor of the Arabs. Israel also had demanded that the conference be a one-time-only meeting with no function other than to kick off face-to-face negotiations between Israel and the Arab governments and between Israel and the Palestinians.

Syria, for its part, maintains that the conference must be under U.N. auspices and sponsorship. Damascus insists that the conference remain in continuous session to mediate disputes between Israel and the Arabs although Syria agrees that the conference itself would not be empowered to impose a settlement.

Baker has indicated that he favors a compromise that would permit the conference to reconvene at any time provided all parties agree. That would seem far closer to the Israeli position than to the Syrian stance because it would give Israel a veto over any resumption. But both countries have rejected Baker’s approach.

The remaining sticking points seem almost trivial in comparison to the stakes involved. However, it appears that both Israel and the Arab states are nervous about starting negotiations without some assurance of the outcome. These issues seem to be a convenient way to avoid commitment, at least for the time being.

The U.S. official said Baker’s most significant accomplishment in Jerusalem may have been to get the approval of Shamir, Levy and Arens for a single Israeli position. Although all three of the government’s senior leaders are members of the rightist Likud Party, they are often at odds. For instance, when Baker last visited Jerusalem earlier this month, Levy handed him a list of Israeli compromises that Shamir repudiated the next day.

“No more of this going to the Foreign Ministry and getting one story and going to the prime minister’s office and getting another and going to the Defense Ministry and getting another,” the official said. “We were able successfully to abandon shuttle diplomacy within Israel.”

Times staff writer David Lauter in Washington contributed to this article.