U.S. Forcing Israel Into a Showdown

By hailing Syria’s acceptance of a U.S. peace conference plan as “a breakthrough” and dispatching Secretary of State James A. Baker III to the Middle East, President Bush is deliberately forcing a showdown with Israel on a politically explosive question:

Will the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir come to a peace conference on American terms or not?

During four months of grueling shuttle diplomacy, Baker has obtained the agreement of all the major Arab powers to a U.S.-designed plan for Arab-Israeli peace talks. Now that even Syria, Israel’s most intransigent enemy, has agreed, only Israel is holding out.

At the economic summit here Tuesday, Bush added a formal declaration of support for the American plan from Western Europe, Japan and Canada.

Now Baker is heading for Jerusalem to demand an answer from Shamir, who has adamantly rejected every version of the U.S. peace plan so far.

The result is a high-stakes diplomatic gamble: an attempt to focus enough pressure on Shamir to force him to come to the peace table--or else face a deep-freeze in relations with the United States and a split in his own domestic consensus.

“It could work out very nicely, with the peace process moving forward, or it could end up as a train wreck,” a senior Bush Administration official said.

The American plan is designed to open direct, one-on-one peace talks between Israel and its Arab neighbors, as well as between the Jerusalem government and the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Baker acknowledged Tuesday in a press conference that he still faces “plenty of hurdles.”

“We are at a point where direct, bilateral negotiations may indeed be possible, but obviously it depends upon what the reaction of other governments is,” he said.

Israel has long declared its desire for direct peace talks with its neighbors. But senior U.S. officials say Shamir has seemed reluctant to see actual negotiations begin, apparently because he fears they could create pressure for withdrawal from territory Israel conquered in 1967 and has subsequently blanketed with settlements.

Even Baker’s itinerary through the Middle East appears to have been designed to increase the pressure on Israel. He is scheduled to arrive in Syria tonight and go on to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt before arriving in Jerusalem; aides hope his stops in the Arab capitals will produce a new flurry of Arab commitments to peace talks.

Baker’s strategy, one official said, is to present Shamir with as clear-cut a proposition as possible--to force the Israeli to respond with a yes or no.

In Damascus, his first stop, Baker will be seeking “clarifications and assurances” to make sure Syrian President Hafez Assad is fully committed to the peace plan, the official said. Until now, Israeli officials had argued that there was no reason for them to accept or reject the U.S. plan before Syria did.

Baker pointedly noted twice Tuesday, however, that Syria’s official response to the peace plan came with no conditions.

U.S. officials said it was a stunning turnabout for Assad, who bluntly rejected an earlier version of the American plan when Baker visited him in May.

“Now, Israel may face something it hasn’t faced before--a united Arab approval of a peace conference they may find hard to resist,” a senior Administration official said. “To the extent Baker is able to bring the Arabs together, there will be a major source of pressure on Israel they have never faced before.”

The political declaration of the economic summit turned up the pressure, calling on Israel to suspend its policy of building settlements in the occupied territories and on the Arabs to suspend their boycott of companies doing business with Israel. The summit’s decision to include those statements, which were not in the official draft of the communique, represented a victory for Bush.

Thus, as Israel looks beyond its borders, it sees a reunited Arab world willing to begin peace talks steered by its major ally, the United States, and similar pressure for talks coming from Western Europe and Japan.

The Shamir government has been dazed by the apparent Syrian willingness to talk. Direct contact with the powerful and hostile neighbor is something Israel has long wanted--last year, Shamir himself issued an invitation to Assad for talks. Yet when they now seem possible, suspicion colors every official reaction.

“We of course welcome any positive change from Syria,” government spokesman Yossi Olmert said Tuesday. “But we wonder what is behind the change.”

One theory making the rounds is that Washington has secretly promised Syria the return of the Golan Heights, which it lost in the 1967 Middle East War.

Bush and Baker have pressed Israel before. Last year, they worked for months to try to arrange a direct meeting between Israel and representatives of the Palestinians, only to see Shamir back away from the deal. That round ended with an exasperated Baker publicly accusing the Israeli prime minister of rejecting a chance for peace and inviting him to telephone the White House when he was ready to deal.

The chill produced by that episode ended during the Persian Gulf War, when Israel cooperated with the United States. But for the last four months, Bush and Baker have slowly been turning up the heat on Shamir again. Two weeks ago, Bush publicly threatened to denounce any government in the Middle East that rejected his peace plan.

Times staff writer Daniel Williams in Jerusalem contributed to this story.