For Israelis, It’s Not a Kosher City

The culinary delights of Madrid are considerable, but they have been lost on some religious members of the Israeli delegation to the Middle East peace conference. They brought no kosher food, and there is none to be found in the Spanish capital.

“It is a sensitive issue,” said Nachman Shai, an Israeli spokesman, after Jerusalem newspapers reported the kosher shortfall Thursday. In a nation where a government once fell because some of its members broke a ban against traveling on the Sabbath, the support of religious parties that strictly observe dietary laws is essential to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Today’s final session of the opening round begins and ends early--from 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. local time, to allow Shamir and the Israeli delegation to return to Jerusalem before the Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown.

Some of them will leave Madrid hungry.

The elegant 18th-Century Royal Palace, site of the peace conference, is a Spanish national treasure that rivals the Prado museum as Madrid’s premier tourist attraction.

But this week the palace, a king’s home built on the ruins of a Moorish palace that burned down on Christmas Eve in 1734, became one of the most heavily guarded buildings on Earth.

Although the world clearly heard the calls for peace that issued from it, not so all the palace guardians.

Deep beneath the glitter, a special team of Spanish police who proudly call themselves the “sewer rats” kept watch over a maze of tunnels leading from the palace toward the center of town.

The tunnels were used by kings and knaves escaping the rigors of court life for a night on the town. One frequent tunnel traveler was Joseph Bonaparte, placed uncomfortably on the Spanish throne by his brother Napoleon. Spaniards, who never liked Joseph, remember him as “Pepe the Bottle.”

The chimera of peace came to Madrid punctuated by the “u-lu-lu” of VIP motorcades sirening self importantly through gray streets. Madrid residents, whose capital has been turned topsy-turvy for the conference, greeted it with a mixture of awe, sudden sophistication and callow disinterest.

“Jews and Arabs at the same table. It’d be wonderful if something came of it,” said an architect sipping coffee at the Estrella de Campos bar on Conde de Xiquena Street.

“Just more blah, blah, blah, and Spain is paying the bill,” riposted his companion.

The first thing that struck political analysts at the Estrella de Campos was that the meeting table was too wide for Arabs and Jews to throw punches across.

When it also became apparent that George Bush dwarfed Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, patriotism blended with pragmatism. “Shoe lifts, Felipe, high heels,” called one patron to a television screen.

The Israeli and Palestinian delegations are housed in three-star hotels of roughly equal quality in downtown Madrid. For other participants, the sky’s the limit.

Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, the flamboyant Saudi ambassador to the United States, has a big suite in a hotel where reporters are being charged $450 just for a single room.

The accommodations of Secretary of State James A. Baker may also raise some eyebrows--briefly--among accountants at Foggy Bottom.

The prince is at the Ritz, but the secretary is at the Palace.

Rest easy, though, taxpaying Americans: Despite the luster of its name, the Palace is $250 a night for a single.

Among the 4,500 journalists accredited to the conference are a number for whom journalism is not their most consuming passion.

New York radical rabbi Avi Weiss, who once led raiders in a protest against a convent of Carmelite nuns at Auschwitz, has a press pass. So does Shmuel Shmueli, who says he is the editor of a fringe right-wing publication in Israel but who spends less time collecting news than canvassing Arabs to support his plan to divide up the West Bank into 12 cantons “just like Switzerland.”

It took patience and heavy-hitting American diplomacy to get Middle Eastern enemies to the same table, but diplomacy has its limits. At Baker’s news conference on opening day, an Italian with press credentials braced him this way:

“The decisions of this conference depend on the realization of the third secret of Fatima. This was never recognized by the church, and this means they will cause a third world war. What do you think about that?”

To which Baker replied: “I didn’t hear the first part of your question because the interpretation wasn’t coming through. I heard the last part of it. And since I don’t understand it, I won’t try and answer it.”

The secret, Mr. Secretary: Fatima is the village in central Portugal where the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared six times to three shepherd children on the 13th of every month from May to October, 1917.

The three so-called secrets or messages supposedly were a description of hell, a prediction of war and destruction and finally a prediction about the end of the world.