Israel, Syria Negotiate With Christopher’s Help

The leaders of Syria and Israel began Thursday what amounts to personal negotiations in the Middle East peace talks, with U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher as a go-between--marking the most significant breakthrough in months in the stalemated negotiations.

After delivering a message Thursday from Syrian President Hafez Assad to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Christopher scheduled a second trip to Damascus for this morning, apparently to carry the Israeli leader’s reply to Assad. Officials characterized both messages as “substantive.”

Christopher himself described the development as a “significant” one. “The important development that’s taking place here is that we’ve been asked by the parties to transmit messages, to serve as an intermediary,” he told reporters at a press conference.

Christopher said he is returning to Damascus this morning because there are “one or two matters I wanted to clarify” with Assad “and ask him to clarify, or pass messages back to him.”

Rabin, who met with Christopher twice on Thursday, hailed the message from Assad as “good news.”

Although all sides cautioned that the new turn of events marked only a first step, it constituted the most significant procedural breakthrough since last autumn, just after Rabin took office and committed Israel to an offer to withdraw its forces from the Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in 1967.

The peace negotiations between Israel and Syria, which have been stalemated for several months, are widely regarded as the key to a broader political settlement of the Middle East crisis, and Assad is considered to be influential in persuading other Arab countries to go along.

U.S. officials, confirming the new progress, suggested privately that Israel and Syria may also move their bilateral negotiations to a “higher level” than before, possibly involving their foreign ministers or, in some cases, even their heads of government.

Analysts say that if the Israeli-Syrian talks get off the ground, it could spur progress in parallel negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on self-government for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These talks have also been at an impasse for more than six months.

In a radio call-in show broadcast to the Arab world Thursday, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres suggested, although not for the first time, that Israel would make a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights if Syria agreed to a full peace.

Asked if Israel was willing to withdraw from the Golan in the same manner that it did from the Egyptian Sinai in 1982, Peres said: “If the Syrians behave in the same way as the Egyptians did, Israel will behave exactly with Syria as it did with Egypt.”

Israel, meanwhile, has opened a direct channel of communication with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the hope of faster progress on Palestinian autonomy on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to Israeli sources.

Yossi Sarid, the Israeli environment minister, and Dedi Zucker, another leader of the dovish Meretz Party, met two weeks ago in Cairo with Nabil Shaath, a senior adviser to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, to discuss immediate autonomy for the Gaza Strip as a step toward full self-government.

But the fact that an Israeli Cabinet minister and a top PLO official held talks, reportedly conducted with Rabin’s blessing, was even more important than what was discussed, because the contact ended Israel’s longstanding refusal to deal directly with the PLO.

“We are apparently in a new chapter of our history,” said Yossi Beilin, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, although he refused to confirm it officially. “It’s part of a process which in my eyes seems natural.”

Amid a storm of immediate criticism from the right-wing opposition, Sarid and Zucker declined to discuss the meeting, and senior government officials implied that it had been a Meretz initiative.

“When a minister in the Israeli government meets with a representative of an organization whose entire purpose and goal is the destruction of the state of Israel, that is progress only toward the creation of a Palestinian state,” Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of the opposition Likud Party, said.

“This is, in fact, a new chapter, a dangerous chapter, of political decline, a decline in security, and we will fight it.”

Christopher, meanwhile, moved toward a windup of his week of shuttle diplomacy today, stopping in Amman late Thursday to confer with Jordan’s King Hussein.

He later returned to Jerusalem for a brief meeting with Palestinian peace negotiators, who gave him a detailed response from the PLO on American proposals for Palestinian self-government--a reversal of their previous position, in which they refused to respond in writing.

Despite the new sense of optimism Thursday, U.S. officials were cautious.

“The next phase involves making hard decisions,” a senior U.S. official told reporters aboard Christopher’s plane. Right now, he said, the two sides are “walking up to the line and circling it and seeing what it looks like.”