Foreign Policy Revamp Lit Fire of Israeli Talks : Mideast: Planners were given free rein to restructure, find new approaches to peace with Arab neighbors.

A year ago, as Shimon Peres and his top advisers began total restructuring of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, they agreed there should be a small group to re-examine the country’s policy positions and explore new approaches, especially to peace with its neighbors.

The instructions to the ministry’s new political planning branch were: “Be creative, be daring, be provocative,” according to Yitzhak Oren, who oversaw the restructuring as the ministry’s head of coordination. “We told them, ‘Slay all the sacred cows--just butcher them.’

“We could see a real chance of peace ahead, and we knew we needed a lot of new thinking to make it work. . . . Today, we see some of the results.”

Not all of the progress made in the peace talks over the past year with the Palestine Liberation Organization and Jordan was due to the new group’s work--the hard decisions were made by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Peres--but the unit’s efforts reflected the Israeli determination to maintain the momentum of the peace talks with a continuing search for compromises.

“The test has been not to rest and not to stand pat, but to keep pushing for those decisive, crucial breakthroughs,” Mark Sofer, a Peres policy adviser, said. “The decisions are made at the highest levels, as they should be in a democracy, but we have had the most free-wheeling discussions imaginable at the working levels.”

And Oren and Sofer credit the half-dozen members of the Foreign Ministry’s policy planning unit with getting Israeli leaders to think in new directions, consider challenging scenarios, particularly in negotiations with the PLO.

“ ‘Don’t repeat our ideas to us,’ Peres told them,” Oren recounted. “ ‘Tell us something new, tell us something provocative, . . . tempt us to think in new ways.’ That is very difficult for any bureaucracy to do, but it is something we had to do if we were going to find a way out of this very, very long conflict.”

The task before Israeli diplomats over the past year has been immense, both in terms of its life-or-death importance for the country and in its sheer scope and complexity--five sets of negotiations with different partners, each with its own issues, each with its own forum, each with its own style.

A former Rabin adviser compared it to “solving four or five very difficult simultaneous equations, each of which is itself the sum of 10 or 20 other equations.”

“Every time we reached an agreement with the Palestinians, we had to ask what impact it would have on Jordan or Egypt,” he said, referring to the countries that border the self-governing Palestinian territories. “Every sentence we wrote with the Jordanians, we had to examine in terms of the treaty we hope one day we will negotiate with the Syrians.”

Since its establishment as a state in 1948, Israel has longed for the day when it would be able to negotiate peace treaties with each of its immediate Arab neighbors and achieve acceptance in the region as a whole.

“Shimon Peres has dedicated years of his life, decades actually, to reach this point, but far from sitting back and savoring it, he’s working 20 hours a day to make sure we succeed,” Sofer said. “These are crucially important times, the issues are incredibly complex and sensitive, and the energy required for so many sets of negotiations is immense.”

At the same time, Israeli negotiators are largely drawn from diplomats, along with some soldiers and a few academics, who have been waiting their entire career for this moment.

“In a sense, we have been preparing for these talks for 45 years,” Oren said. “They have not caught us by surprise. The logistics, the position papers, the internal discussions--these are things we have been trained and prepared for.

“And so we were ready and we are coping because this is the moment for which we have lived--the hope that soon we will be at peace with our neighbors. Idealism, yes, but it’s an ideal that gives people the energy to work 18-hour shifts and still be sharp and critical and creative.”

Yet all their ideas, including those of the brainstorming Foreign Ministry policy planners, are run past Peres and finally Rabin before they are put on the negotiating table as Israel’s position.

“In the end, the final coordination is done by Rabin and Peres, especially Rabin, for every move we make must have political support among the Israeli public,” a senior Israeli diplomat said. “That means Rabin sits and weighs what he can sell and what he needs in return to sell it. Those are the nitty-gritty talks: Rabin sitting with Peres and then Rabin sitting by himself.”

As the negotiations proliferated, this has been harder. The volume of decisions has grown and the speed of the process has accelerated:

* With Jordan, Israel is negotiating a peace treaty and agreements on economic cooperation. The issues range from ending the state of war between them and delineating a border to sharing water resources and cooperating on road construction. Adjourned to Aug. 8, the talks are expected to surge ahead after Monday’s summit in Washington between Rabin and King Hussein.

* With the PLO, Israel is working toward a much broader form of autonomy, extending self-government throughout the West Bank, holding the Palestinians’ first national elections as well as implementing the present agreement on autonomy for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank district of Jericho. Talks continue on an almost daily basis in the Palestinian territories or Cairo.

* With Syria, Israel is discussing the framework for a peace treaty. It will be trading withdrawal from the Golan Heights that it captured in 1967 for peace and normal relations, the terms of which are disputed. With U.S. mediation, Damascus and Jerusalem are moving to the substance of the agreement without yet settling its basic parameters.

* With Lebanon, Israel has the most straightforward set of talks. It has pledged to pull all its troops out of southern Lebanon within six months of the re-establishment of the Beirut government’s authority and presence in the border region. Agreement, however, depends on a settlement with Syria first.

* And, across the Middle East, there are wide-ranging, multilateral negotiations, begun after the Madrid Peace Conference in October, 1991, that seek to resolve major regional issues, such as economic development, sharing of water resources, resettlement of refugees and arms control. They involve Israel, its neighbors and a score of countries outside the area.

Although the goal is a comprehensive peace, Israel’s strategy is to pursue agreements with each country and on each regional issue.

“Israel learned long ago that it could not negotiate with all the Arabs at once,” Shmuel Sandler, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, said. “These become negotiations of the ‘highest common denominator,’ and each Arab country is afraid of being seen by the others as weak or too mild, and they wind up outbidding each other. . . .

“To negotiate with all of them but separately is already an achievement, and maintaining this course of diverse negotiations will be essential to the ultimate success of a comprehensive peace.”

Not only are the goals of each set of negotiations quite distinct, Israelis point out, but so are the styles.

“With the Jordanians, we have a foundation of understandings based on years of secret meetings between our leaders, on a working relationship along the armistice line, on common interests that don’t need to be spelled out,” a senior Israeli diplomat said. “It is almost an intimacy, if you will. . . .

“With the Palestinians, there is a familiarity. We have lived with one another, in sickness and health, in poverty and wealth, in war and peace, for more than 27 years of the occupation and even longer. For the last year, we have dealt with a crisis a day, or so it has seemed. We just know each other, even if we haven’t learned to love each other.

“But with the Syrians, it remains tense, remote, discussions through the Americans, demands more than offerings. The feeling, on both sides probably, is: This is something we have to do, but, boy, we don’t like it.”

As a historian of Israel’s negotiations with the Arabs, Sandler sees a shift back from the totality pursued by the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin in his dealings with Egypt to the step-by-step approach used by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger after the 1973 Middle East War, when Rabin was prime minister.

“Step-by-step suits Rabin’s personality, and that matters because he bears the ultimate responsibility for the decisions Israel makes,” Sandler said. “He is suspicious by nature; he doesn’t trust people; he is skeptical of new ideas and of anything that smacks of a ‘breakthrough.’ Rabin, in other words, would like to see what he is getting before he goes further.”

Yair Hirschfeld, a Haifa University political scientist who played a major role in the secret Israeli-PLO negotiations, said that the key element in the recent momentum has been the very success of those first moves a year ago.

“Nothing is more successful than success, and the Arabs want to become part of what is growing into a dramatic success of historic proportions,” Hirschfeld said.

“The agreement with the Palestinians continues to have an enormous psychological impact, because in solving the Palestinian issue we are removing the announced reason for the whole conflict. . . . Syria may choose to provide the capstone of the endeavor, but the Palestinians laid the cornerstone.”

Hirschfeld sees major international developments continuing to drive the negotiations--factors that lie in the background but still drive the peace process.

They include the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new international coalition; the defeat of radical forces during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the strengthening of pragmatists in the Middle East; the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to the pragmatists; the Palestinian intifada , or rebellion, against the Israeli occupation, and a realism born of 20 years of trial-and-error Mideast negotiations.

Hirschfeld also sees the Rabin government willing to use its “mandate for peace” from 1992 parliamentary elections, a feeling of “now or never” among the region’s leaders and a U.S. Administration with an interest in a foreign policy success for its own political needs.

“In Israel, we have a very, very strong leadership in Rabin and Peres,” Hirschfeld continued, “and they are supported by younger men with new ideas, by advisers and staffs willing to break through the old shibboleths. The key, though, is that our body politic wants peace, and we are finding partners on the other side.”