Cabinet Supports Shamir on Talks : Israel: Only 3 of 20 ministers vote against decision to enter peace negotiations.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Cabinet, overcoming suspicions that Israel is setting a course that will cost it territory it now occupies, on Sunday ratified Shamir’s decision to enter U.S.-organized Middle East peace talks.

Only three of 20 Cabinet ministers voted against Shamir’s decision, which was made conditional on the selection of Palestinian negotiators suitable to Israel. The dissenters, Housing Minister Ariel Sharon from Shamir’s Likud Party and two others from small parties of the far right, insisted that a trap was being laid for Israel.

Radio reports said Sharon and Shamir argued bitterly, with Sharon accusing Shamir of hiding risks from the public and Shamir accusing Sharon of fulfilling a lust for power with his negative vote.

Despite the rancor, the result confirms Shamir is in full control of his government’s policy leading up to October, the month proposed by President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev for the opening session of talks.

“No doubt this is a major move forward, and we have to be very careful about it,” said Health Minister Ehud Olmert, a protege of Shamir’s. “But I think that the damage that might have been caused to Israel had we answered negatively was much greater than the risk involved.”

Olmert suggested that Israel’s decision was heavily influenced by the desire of the Bush Administration to move the process forward.

“It (a negative reply) could have isolated the state of Israel and the government of Israel at a time when there is a genuine expectation among many countries that something will be done in order to advance the chance of meaningful negotiations,” Olmert told reporters.

The Cabinet move marks an advance from Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s last effort to arrange peace talks, when during 1989 and 1990 Sharon and others in the Likud Party formed a “constraints” faction that undermined Shamir’s leadership.

After seven trips to Israel across a five-month period this time, Baker won a qualified assent from Shamir, who was attracted by the chance of having face-to-face talks with Israel’s Arab neighbors, especially heavily armed Syria.

The main stumbling block has been a conflict over who would represent the Palestinians in the talks. Israel wants a veto over the Palestinian delegation, rejecting a role for the Palestine Liberation Organization and demanding that Palestinians from Jerusalem be barred. The PLO insists that only it can anoint Palestinian negotiators, and it opposes exclusion of Jerusalem Arabs.

Israel claims sole sovereignty over the Holy City, including Arab districts captured from Jordan, along with the West Bank, during the 1967 Six-Day War and since formally annexed by the Israeli government. The Palestinians want to put the capital of a state that they hope eventually to achieve on the eastern side of Jerusalem.

Israel and the Palestinians are also requesting details from Washington setting out the scope of the planned talks.

With all of these details yet to be worked out, Baker was winding up his latest Middle East shuttle with a swing through North African capitals to press Arab governments to persuade the PLO not to stand in the way of talks.

In Israel, reaction to Shamir’s decision has been mixed. Rightist politicians are still wary that the talks are a trap. “We live in a bad neighborhood, one in which you do not apologize for adopting a cautious approach,” Binyamin Begin, a member of Parliament and son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, wrote in the Jerusalem Post.

Sharon, who has poured Housing Ministry funds into a crash program to develop the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, has called the decision to go to talks a “historic mistake.”

Doves predicted that more compromises are on the way and would eventually lead to a surrender of occupied land in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967 and, like eastern Jerusalem, since formally annexed by Israel. The annexations are not recognized by the United States.

“Israel’s borders will be decided at the end of this process, by agreement between Israel and the Arabs, on the basis of territorial concessions,” wrote Avraham Tamir, a former Israeli diplomat, in the Haaretz newspaper.

Added Haaretz commentator Akiva Eldar: “It is possible that once positions crystallize and the Israeli people see that they have someone with whom they can talk, then they will tell the government there is something to talk about . . . the future of the territories.”

Some Palestinians say there is danger of violence if hard-core activists perceive that the Palestinian quest for a state is at an end.

On Sunday, the occupied territories’ militant Islamic Jihad group, an affiliate of the PLO, threatened the lives of Palestinian leaders who met with Baker last week. “Islamic Jihad condemns the traitors who surrender to solutions and warns anybody from sitting and negotiating,” a statement from the group said.

It was not clear whether that warning represents a split in the PLO; all the delegates who met with Baker were given the go-ahead by the PLO.

In this process so far, almost every substantial decision veils a tangle of symbolism, and choosing a site for a U.S.-Soviet-sponsored conference that is to commence the talks appears to be no exception.

The Israelis oppose Geneva--one of the suggested sites--because previous international conferences have been held there on the Middle East. The Shamir government is sensitive to criticism that it might be sitting down to a mass gathering that might compromise its own subsequent face-to-face talks with each Arab neighbor and with the Palestinians.

The Soviets oppose Washington as a site because an American venue would imply the obvious: that the United States was instrumental in bringing the hostile parties together and the Soviet Union was just window dressing.

Moscow is reportedly out because the Bush Administration is not willing to surrender to Gorbachev the pomp of convening the conference. Other places in Europe are in dispute because of the various positions of the prospective host countries in the Arab-Israeli conflict. That situation brings everyone back to neutral Switzerland--although not to Geneva.