Rabin, Mubarak Expect Mideast Talks to Resume : Diplomacy: The two confer as pressure grows on Palestinians to join negotiations next week.

With maximum pressure now upon the Palestinians to return to the Arab-Israeli peace talks, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin expressed confidence after meeting Wednesday that the negotiations will resume next week in Washington following a four-month break.

Rabin, intensifying that pressure, said Israel is ready to negotiate with the Palestinians on all issues and make the compromises necessary to grant them self-government and reach a permanent settlement--but only within the framework of the Washington talks and not before the Palestinians return.

“After meeting President Mubarak, I am much more hopeful, and I stress hopeful, that the peace negotiations will be resumed,” Rabin said after more than three hours of talks with the Egyptian leader at a villa on the Suez Canal.

Mubarak, who had met Tuesday in Cairo with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told Rabin flatly, according to participants in the meeting, that the Palestinians will go to Washington on the terms worked out in recent weeks of complex bargaining. That would free other Arab delegations to return as well.

Later, at a joint press conference with Rabin, Mubarak qualified his confidence only a bit as he, too, put the burden on the Palestinians for resumption of the talks and, by extension, their success or failure.

“There are very great hopes that the talks will be held on (Tuesday), and this will be decided in the meeting of (Arab foreign ministers) that will take place in Damascus on Friday and Saturday,” Mubarak said, basking in Egypt’s role as a key mediator. “My big hopes are based on the fact that all the factions want peace.”

Syria, Jordan and Lebanon are eager to resume the talks. But the Palestinians have sought major Israeli concessions, including the return of almost 400 accused Islamic militants exiled last December, an easing of Israeli restrictions in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and, above all, an improved offer on autonomy.

“If the Palestinians don’t come or if they postpone their return, they will miss the train, for the international community, namely the United States, will turn its attention to other world problems,” Mubarak declared, according to a participant in the talks.

Rabin assured Mubarak that Israel is willing to negotiate everything, including “territory for peace,” with the Palestinians, either in an interim agreement on autonomy or in an overall settlement that will follow. Palestinian negotiators have been seeking such a commitment from Israel as well as new proposals on self-government.

Referring to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Rabin told the press conference, “We don’t want to annex the bulk of almost 2 million Palestinians residing in the occupied territories.” But Israel will not go back to its pre-1967 borders, he added.

Rabin said Israel might reopen the West Bank and Gaza Strip, permitting their residents to work in Israel, if Palestinian violence against Israelis stops.

Determined to get sustained negotiations under way again, Rabin said all the moves Israel has been discussing with Egypt, the United States and the European Community will come only after the negotiations resume.

“The Palestinians have already had a peek in the envelope, but they get nothing before sitting down,” a senior Israeli official said. “We understand their need to know what they will get, and we went as far as we could with Mubarak to assure them they will get it.”

Israeli officials also expressed support for the suggestion, originally made by Rabin but since taken up by the United States, for continuous negotiations once the Washington talks resume.

“This stop-and-go leads to a lot of stalls,” one Rabin aide remarked. “Once we start, let’s keep going.”

Palestinian negotiators said in Jerusalem that they, too, would like to keep the talks in virtually permanent session as long as they are serious.

Palestinian sources in Cairo said after Arafat’s visit that they had enough of a package to justify returning to the peace talks, though a heated debate is likely at the PLO executive committee session in Tunis today.

These, according to Palestinian sources, are some of the most important elements of that package:

An accelerated timetable for return of the Islamic militants exiled to southern Lebanon in December.

The return home of 30 to 40 deportees from earlier years.

An Israeli statement pledging no more deportations, though this will depend on the “security situation.”

* Restatement of Israel’s acceptance of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, including acknowledgment of “legitimate Palestinian rights” and the principle of territorial withdrawal.

Times staff writer Kim Murphy in Cairo contributed to this report.