Syrian Terms Shamir Killer in Bitter Session : Diplomacy: Foreign Minister Shareh displays an old photograph as the earlier niceties disappear.

Syria’s foreign minister, a scowl of indignation on his face Friday, held up a picture of a 32-year-old Yitzhak Shamir.

“He kills peace mediators,” charged the minister, Farouk Shareh, summoning up a lifetime of vitriol.

Shareh’s performance was the climax of a morning of intense hostility between the Syrian and Israeli representatives to the Madrid peace talks. The diplomatic niceties, loosely fitting at best as the Israelis and Arabs met for the third time this week, peeled off like old paint in the suddenly bright Madrid sun.

This was a day planned for the Israeli and Arab sides to respond to the addresses each had made the previous day. It gave everyone a chance to get things off their chests.

For the Palestinians, Jordanians and Lebanese, it was a time to press their view that the main issue in the way of peace is land that Israel occupies and that the Arabs want back.

For Israel and Syria, it was a chance to growl.

The attack by the dapper, if dour, Shareh was in reference to the role of Shamir, now Israel’s 76-year-old prime minister, in the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, a U.N. representative to the Middle East, in 1948. (Shamir’s aides have denied he was involved in Bernadotte’s slaying.)

The dredging up of history, a favorite sport so far in the ceremonial stage of the talks, had the goal of rebutting comments from Shamir, made in an earlier address Friday morning, about the horrors of Hafez Assad’s regime in Syria.

“Syria is the home of a host of terrorist organizations that spread violence and death to all kinds of innocent targets, including civil aviation, and women and children of many nations,” Shamir asserted. “Syria merits the dubious honor of being one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world.”

Shamir, the session’s opening speaker, promptly returned to Israel in time for the Jewish Sabbath, which began at sunset. He missed Shareh’s attack on him but, upon reaching Israel’s international airport, brushed it off.

“It makes no impact on me,” said the former underground fighter, whose alleged involvement in assassinations during Israel’s independence struggle has been long documented in Israeli histories.

This was not the hopeful meeting of minds that Secretary of State James A. Baker III had in mind when he persuaded the Arabs and Israelis to get together and talk. He dismissed the set-to as early posturing, a sort of throat-clearing before the adversaries get down to business. “Now, the real work of peace must begin,” he said in a news conference after the morning’s savage attacks.

During his own formal remarks to the conference, Baker played the role of sideline coach, alternately encouraging the players to play well and chiding them for their bad training habits. He criticized them all for failing to make a single, meaningful goodwill gesture in all the months leading up to the talks.

“The unwillingness of the parties to take confidence-building steps has been disappointing,” Baker conceded to the gathering in Madrid’s Royal Palace. “You have failed to deal adequately with the human dimension of the conflict.”

Shamir, in his remarks Friday morning, at least offered words of conciliation to Jordan, with which Israel shares a long border. “We have a situation of de facto nonbelligerency with Jordan,” he said. “We sincerely believe that a peace treaty with Jordan is achievable.”

Withholding such treatment for the Palestinians, Shamir rejected their complaint that they are a historically aggrieved people. “Twisting history and perversion of fact will not earn the sympathy they strive to acquire,” he argued. Still, Shamir invited them to “join us in negotiations.”

Shamir’s departure immediately after his speech, although it had been scheduled in advance of the conference, nevertheless struck the Palestinians as an insult. They noted that the Muslim delegates to the peace conference had forgone their prayers Friday, their main day of prayer, to attend the third and final day of the talks’ first round.

A ‘Wanted’ Man

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is a former commander of the underground Stern gang, which fought British rule of Palestine. In 1988, two former Stern gang members said they were involved in the 1948 assassination of Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, a U.N. mediator. They said Bernadotte was slain because he planned to grant the United Nations control over Jerusalem and hand over key areas to Arabs. The two men did not mention Shamir, and the prime minister’s aides denied his involvement. But former Stern leader Yisrael Scheib-Eldad has said the group’s commanders approved the killing, “and I don’t remember anyone opposing it.” A “wanted poster” of Shamir, right, then 32 and known as Itzhak Yezernitsky, was displayed Friday by Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh during a speech at the Middle East peace conference.