Shamir, Baker Discuss Next Peace Talks : Israel: The Jewish leader says he’s eager to continue the meetings. But he bars retreat from occupied territories.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir discussed the next phase of Middle East peace negotiations with Secretary of State James A. Baker III on Thursday after delivering an unyielding speech in which he said his government’s security requires it to retain its hold on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Speaking at a conference of American Jewish leaders in Baltimore, Shamir said Israel should not be asked to “retreat from areas taken in wars of survival,” a reference to the territory occupied by Israeli forces during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Although Shamir said that his government has no faith in the promises of Arab regimes, which he labeled “tyrannies and dictatorships,” he said that Israel is eager to resume the face-to-face negotiations with its neighbors that began earlier this month in Madrid. While asserting that the talks will get nowhere as long as the Arabs expect Israel to make concessions, he said both sides must be willing to “invest effort, energy and goodwill.”

After a meeting of more than two hours with Shamir, Baker said he may set a time and place for resumption of separate bilateral talks between Israel and each of its major adversaries--Syria, Lebanon and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.

U.S. officials said Baker is expected to call for a resumption of talks in early December, most likely in Washington. But Israeli officials said that Shamir, who wants the talks to be held somewhere in the Middle East, told Baker that he is reluctant to agree to a Washington meeting.

Shamir met Baker in Washington after his Baltimore speech. Shamir is scheduled to confer today with President Bush at the White House.

The private Madrid talks, following the often acrimonious formal opening, did not go beyond procedures for later negotiations. Still, the meetings were unprecedented. Although there have been high-level negotiations between Israel and Lebanon in the past, the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian talks were the first of their kind.

“Ever since the State of Israel was founded, we called for direct face-to-face negotiations between us and our neighbors,” Shamir said in his speech to the Council of Jewish Federations, an umbrella group representing 153 local federations. “The first such meetings were in Madrid. We didn’t expect much. The gaps are still wide. The gulf is deep.

“But we shall meet again,” he said. “And we hope the ice will begin to melt. We hope the Arab representatives will approach the talks with a desire to make peace, not only to win concessions. If we are to bring down the wall, both sides must invest effort, energy and good will.”

Hoping to persuade American Jewish leaders to endorse his hard-line views, Shamir said that his tiny state cannot withdraw from any of the occupied territory without endangering its security: “Peace without security spells disaster for our state. We live in an unstable, undemocratic, militaristic region, where force is king, terrorism is endemic and hatred of Israel universal.”

It was an argument that most members of the audience had heard many times before, and, judging from a poll made public Tuesday, many of them find less than persuasive. The poll, conducted by the Wilstein Institute of Los Angeles, covered 205 of 300 officers of the federation; 76% of respondents said that continued Israeli rule over 1.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would make Israel “less democratic, less Jewish or both.”

Shamir still received standing ovations before and after his speech and was applauded often as he spoke. He reaffirmed that Israel is prepared to offer West Bank and Gaza Palestinians a form of limited self-rule. That autonomy plan, proposed at the 1978 Camp David conference, was accepted in principle by the Palestinian delegation at Madrid after more than a decade of rejection. Unless either side pulls back during the negotiations to work out the details, the autonomy plan will take effect in about a year.

But Shamir said Israel would refuse to permit the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Shamir, who voted against the Israel-Egypt peace treaty in the Israeli Parliament, also heaped scorn on that 12-year-old pact, the first and only formal treaty between Jerusalem and any Arab government.

“In exchange for a peace treaty, we gave up more than 90% of the areas we took in 1967,” Shamir said. “I am sorry to say that to this day, Egypt has refused to fulfill many normalization agreements . . . and continues to oppose the abolition of the grotesque United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. . . . How long can we trust promises, agreements and guarantees which Arab hostility renders valueless?”