Bush’s Words Please Israel but Arabs Fret

Israeli and Arab delegates picked over President Bush’s spotlight speech to the Middle East peace conference Wednesday like tourists over hors d’oeuvres at Madrid’s wine bars, seizing the morsels they liked and rejecting with a frown the ones they found hard to swallow.

Almost everyone agreed that Bush chose his language carefully, with the aim of tantalizing the participants enough to keep them interested but not promising anything to one side that might alarm someone else.

“Everything here is fudging and subtleties and an effort to say things that everyone can read in a different way,” said Dore Gold, a defense analyst from Tel Aviv University.

Israel appeared most pleased overall. Its representatives were happy that Bush--rightly in their view--explained that the aim of the conference was to produce peace treaties. They were satisfied that Bush emphasized Israel’s preoccupation with security and that he said all the matters at issue were best handled in face-to-face talks between Israel and its adversaries, one at a time.

Arabs, by contrast, fretted over what the President omitted. He did not mention Jerusalem. He did not condemn Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He did not ask Israel to trade land for peace, the concept the Arabs thought the conference had been based on.

Did that mean Bush had changed his mind? Or worse, that he might think the Arabs need to give up more territory themselves?

“They’re probably taking it easy on the Israelis at our expense, as usual,” one Jordanian sighed.

Palestinians, displaced from their land when Israel was created after World War II, were almost palpably exuberant that, after months of haggling over details, they were finally sitting at a peace table with Israel--and that anything might happen now.

“There is momentum now, and this momentum has started. The train has moved,” said Palestinian journalist Radwan abu Ayash, a member of the Palestinian advisory team. “Nobody can say any longer we cannot sit together in one room. We have sat together.”

Jordan’s foreign minister, Kamel abu Jaber, described his own sense of foreboding at the beginning of a process that could forever change the face of the Middle East.

“It was a very tense moment,” he said. “Not fear and not hope. I was thinking, here is the gentleman who represents a state that has over time meant to us danger and fear and insecurity, pulling of trees, demolishing of houses, and I was wondering, how are we going to leave this?”

The opening speeches in Madrid’s ornate Royal Palace left all sides eager to attach to them the best possible face. Partisans grasped at phrases, even single words such as “guarantees” and “legitimacy” that could be interpreted to mean that the peace ahead was going to be their kind of peace.

Ehud Gol, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, called Bush’s speech “helpful and positive.” That marked one of the few times in recent weeks that Israeli officials have expressed pleasure over what Bush has said.

“The President emphasized that the effort is not directed just to ending the state of war but to arrive at peace treaties and a real peace and everything that flows from it,” said Yosef Ben-Aharon, a top aide of Shamir’s whose words often reflect his boss’s thinking.

Israeli officials dismissed parts of the speech they didn’t like as “just the American position.” Prominent in that category was Bush’s reference to “territorial compromise,” which could mean that Israel would have to give up at least some of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights to secure peace.

“His statements were consonant with the American opinion. We do not agree,” said Ben-Aharon.

The Israelis took consolation in Bush’s avoidance of the phrase “land for peace,” a term that raises Shamir’s ire. Shamir sat grim-faced throughout Bush’s speech.

Israel went on a media offensive to defend its claim to the land, which it won in the 1967 Middle East War, one in a series of five Israeli-Arab conflicts.

Officials painted a picture of Arab tanks and missiles just seconds from downtown Tel Aviv if Israel gives back the land. However, no one brought up Israel’s biblical claim to the land, which is much on Shamir’s lips when he is in Israel.

Bush’s reference to “unilateral” acts that might harm the peace process was taken by some Israeli observers to include the program to settle tens of thousands of Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza. “He evidently wanted to get that message across,” said a senior Israeli official.

But the Arabs were distressed that Bush appeared to hide behind coded messages in an effort to please everyone.

“It was too balanced,” said Palestinian Ahmed Tibi, in what might have been the quote of the day.

“We can’t say we’re satisfied or not satisfied,” said the spokesman for Syria’s delegation, Zuhair Janaan, whose group sat impassively during the speech. “He satisfied everybody, one can say, diplomatically.”

Referring to Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Janaan said: “Both co-sponsors have delivered a speech where they touched on the basic issues, and their speeches can be summed up as headlines. But in order to have the real feeling and atmosphere, we have to wait until all the speeches begin. The set is OK. But we need action.”

The Palestinians complained that Bush failed to talk about swapping land for peace, or about stopping Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, or about changing the status of Jerusalem, which Israel annexed as its capital shortly after capturing it from Jordan in 1967.

On the other hand, said delegation spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, he did talk about the principle of “fairness.” He emphasized that Palestinian acceptance of an interim period of limited self-rule would not affect talks on the Palestinians’ ultimate status, she said, and he underscored the need to give “the Palestinian people meaningful control over their own lives and fates.”

“We feel this is very important because we feel this is a step toward self-determination.”

Sources close to the Jordanian delegation said it is likely that Jordan will emphasize in its opening speech today that U.N. Resolution 242, in the view of the Arabs, means that Israel must withdraw from occupied Arab lands.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III later in the day was careful to emphasize that the United States is leaving the interpretation of Resolution 242 and companion Resolution 338 up to each of the parties. The American view, he said, “is that those resolutions embrace the principle of territory for peace.”

Nor were the Arabs all happy with the opening remarks of Amir Moussa, foreign minister of Egypt, the only Arab country to have made peace with Israel. They applauded Egypt’s demand for a halt to Jewish settlement building and his insistence that the “legal status of the Palestinian people” be respected.

But Egypt was wishy-washy, some Arabs complained, in its demand about Jerusalem, which Moussa said “should remain free, accessible and sacred to all followers of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.” It should not, he said, be subject to “monopoly (or) illegal sovereignty” by an “occupying power.”

“What he did not say is that the Israelis should return it to Arab soil,” said a Jordanian delegate.