President Ready to Reward Rabin for PLO Accord

President Clinton, determined to reward Israel for making peace with the Palestinians, plans to offer Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a menu of possible economic and technological support when the Israeli leader visits the White House today, a senior Administration official said Thursday.

Although most of the measures are still in the planning stage, the official said, Clinton intends to describe them to Rabin to help the prime minister build support at home for the peace plan that he and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat signed on the White House lawn in September.

The peace agreement has proved to be controversial in Israel, drawing sharp opposition from militant Israeli nationalists who claim that Rabin made too many concessions to the Palestinians while getting too little in return. Radical Palestinians also oppose the pact, which they claim gives them too little.

The measures Clinton is ready to discuss include:

* A pledge that the United States will continue the $3-billion military and economic aid program in the face of a shrinking foreign aid budget, which will mean less aid for most recipients. Israel has enjoyed the U.S. military and economic aid program for nearly two decades, and the current contribution to Israel is the largest any country gets.

* An offer to seek congressional approval of a proposal to permit Israel to use about $250 million in U.S. loan guarantees to pay for the roads, military bases and other infrastructure required to redeploy Israeli troops away from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, as required in the Israel-PLO peace accords.

* An agreement to consider changes in U.S. export control laws to permit Israel to obtain supercomputers and other high-technology equipment with both civilian and military uses.

Officials also said that Clinton is prepared to discuss Israel’s request for F-15E warplanes, the most modern model of the basic F-15 fighter that the Israeli air force has been flying for more than 10 years.

While the package is intended to have the maximum impact on Israeli public opinion, it contains relatively little new money. Administration officials said that the idea was to craft proposals that can be financed in an era of U.S. government austerity.

For instance, the money to help defray the cost of redeploying Israeli troops in Gaza and the West Bank would come from a $10-billion, five-year loan guarantee program approved last year by then-President George Bush to help resettle Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Under the terms of that plan, the maximum guarantee is reduced by the amount of money Israel spends on building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

Clinton is willing to discuss a proposal to restore enough of the funds that have been blocked by that provision to cover the “cost of peace,” the senior official said.

The $3 billion in regular aid programs is a sizable expense, to be sure, but it is one that has been included in U.S. budgets since Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David peace agreement in 1979.

The supercomputers and other high-technology components that Israel is seeking are expensive but not prohibitively so. However, existing U.S. law bans their export even to close allies because they can be used to design ballistic missiles and other sophisticated weaponry.