Top Israeli Officials on Way to U.S. : Diplomacy: Mission’s aim is to cement ties with Clinton Administration and shape its approach to Mideast peace talks.

Israel is sending a full contingent of senior officials to Washington this week to begin its political bonding with the Clinton Administration, a complex process that the Jewish state continues to see as fundamental to its security and even its survival.

The travelers include veteran Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Health Minister Chaim Ramon, a likely Labor Party candidate for prime minister in the future; the two top Israeli negotiators with the Palestinians; Israel’s new ambassador to Washington, and the commander of its air force.

The likely Israeli focus, according to officials and diplomats here, will be an effort to write the agenda for Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s visit to the Middle East later this month and thus to shape the U.S. approach to the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations when they resume in the spring.

Christopher and Peres are scheduled to meet Feb. 16, the day before Christopher leaves for the Middle East.

Also en route to Washington at the invitation of the State Department is Hanan Ashrawi, a key member of the Palestinian delegation to the Arab-Israeli talks. Other Palestinian leaders, including Faisal Husseini, the overall head of the Palestinian negotiating team, and Dr. Haidar Abdul Shafi, the delegation chairman in Washington, may join her.

The Palestinians will be seeking resumption of official U.S. contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization and U.S. assistance in moving Israel into direct negotiations with the PLO.

“The formal (Israeli-Palestinian) negotiations might not resume until mid-April, but there will be enough key people in Washington this week for some real progress on an informal basis,” a European diplomat said. “Everyone says, ‘exploratory,’ ‘informal’ or ‘getting to know one another,’ but this week could be rather intense.”

Jerusalem also wants to move Middle East diplomacy firmly beyond the 415 Palestinians it exiled to southern Lebanon as suspected supporters of militant Islamic groups and to return the focus to the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, which recessed shortly after the Dec. 17 deportations.

“Now that the issue of the deportees is well on its way to resolution,” an Israeli official commented, “it is important to rebuild the momentum of the peace process, to move ahead, to avoid stalling (on the deportees’ repatriation) any longer.”

Yet a third element in Israel’s diplomatic assault on Washington is the complex partnership--and rivalry--between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Peres in the 7-month-old Rabin government.

With different visions of peace for the Middle East and of the way to achieve it, Rabin and Peres compete for U.S. diplomatic support the way they have competed for political support within Israel’s governing Labor Party for the past two decades.

When Rabin saw Peres’ long-planned trip to the United States turning into a crucial series of discussions with the new Clinton Administration, he decided last week to send two aides, Cabinet secretary Elyakim Rubinstein and Maj. Gen. Danny Rothschild, who oversees the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to present their points of view on proposals for Palestinian autonomy.

Rabin, wanting to preempt the Peres visit, had sought an early invitation for himself to meet with Clinton, according to well-informed Israeli sources, but was rebuffed with the message that he should not come to Washington without a major initiative on the Palestinian question.

“The ‘American account’ is something that Rabin wants to run himself, but Peres’ ideas are much closer to the Clinton Administration,” an Israeli political insider commented. “This compounds their longstanding personal rivalry. . . .

“That rivalry has been fed, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps on purpose, by the way Christopher telephoned Rabin, rather than Peres as his counterpart, in trying to resolve the crisis over the deportees. Only at the end was Peres included. As a result, there are differences between Rabin and Peres on what was agreed--and the U.S. is in the middle.”

Israel’s outgoing ambassador in Washington, Zalman Shoval, added to the political tension in the relationship with the United States by giving a farewell interview to Israeli army radio in which he sharply criticized the Rabin government for its approach to seeking peace with the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states.

Shoval will be succeeded today by Prof. Itamar Rabinovitch, Israel’s chief delegate in the peace talks with Syria and Rabin’s personal nominee as ambassador to Washington.

“By coming to an understanding with the U.S., we achieved something very important,” Rabinovitch told journalists on his departure for Washington. “We determined that the responsibility on whether peace talks are resumed . . . (is) placed in the hands of those who want the peace process to continue.”

The compromise over the step-by-step repatriation of the deportees, a process that could take a year but that Arab diplomats hope might be shortened to a few months, returned the initiative to the PLO and its partners in the Arab world, according to Rabinovitch. That, he suggested, is to Israel’s benefit.

“By working out an understanding with the Clinton Administration, Israel has shifted the locus of the decision making from that hill in southern Lebanon (where the deportees are camped) to Washington, and that is an important step forward,” Rabinovitch said.

“One of the important elements of the present joint Israeli-American policy is building a consensus to which (PLO Chairman Yasser) Arafat will have to adapt himself,” Rabinovitch said.

Rabin is now expected to meet Clinton in mid-March, an appointment he originally set about six months ago when he thought President George Bush would win reelection.

But over the weekend, Rabin disparaged the U.S.-sponsored peace talks, as he has several times in recent weeks, and left doubts about the depth of his commitment to negotiations he inherited from the previous government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

“I felt in the last stages that the negotiations were beginning to blur--there was no movement,” Rabin said in an interview on Israeli television. “I think the timeout (as a result of the crisis over the deportees) will give us an opportunity . . . together with the Americans and other parties . . . to learn more about the problem in order to really begin negotiations.”

Yet, Rabin disparaged the multilateral Arab-Israeli talks, a key element of the overall negotiations but overseen by Peres, as pointless.

“The multilaterals, the arms control committee and so forth--we can hold discussions for the next five years and no good will come from them,” Rabin said in the television interview, ignoring their importance to the United States, other Western powers and many Arab states in the Middle East.