Leaders Call for All-Arab Summit on Mideast Peace

Looking to confront the challenge posed by Israel’s incoming government, the leaders of Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia called Saturday for a broad summit that could be the most significant such gathering since the Persian Gulf War shattered Arab unity.

Syrian President Hafez Assad, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah also urged Israel and its conservative prime minister-elect, Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, not to abandon pledges made so far in the peace process, warning that the entire region could be plunged back into a “cycle of tension and violence for which Israel will be held entirely responsible.”

In a statement issued at the end of two days of meetings in Damascus, Syria’s capital, the leaders asked the international community to pressure Israel to remain committed to the formula of “land for peace” that has underpinned Arab-Israeli peace negotiations for the past five years.

The Arab summit--to be held June 21-23 in Cairo, the headquarters of the Arab League--is designed to create a united front in favor of the peace process and to provide a forum for discussion of ways to resist Netanyahu if he sticks to his policy of no more concessions to Arab demands.

Iraq is the only Arab country that won’t be invited, “due to the current sensitivities,” Mubarak told reporters. Baghdad’s participation in such a meeting would amount to a break in the near-total isolation imposed on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein after his 1991 defeat in the Gulf War and would cause diplomatic difficulties with Washington and Kuwait, among others.

The three leaders said in a toughly worded communique that they support the search for a full and comprehensive peace with Israel as a “strategic option” but that peace will be possible only if Israel gives up occupied territories such as the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East War, and if it agrees to the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Netanyahu specifically ruled out either step during his election campaign.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Amir Moussa stressed that the Arab world will be watching carefully during the next two weeks to see what Netanyahu, who narrowly defeated incumbent Shimon Peres in the May 29 vote, intends to do as prime minister.

“We are not calling for confrontation. We are calling for a just peace,” Moussa said.

In Israel, a Likud Party official said there was “no need to get excited about” the proposed summit.

“The fact that this is happening before the government has been born, and before it has even released its main policies . . . reflects the fact that there is nervousness on the opposing side that the relatively comfortable life they had with the previous government has ended,” Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert told Israeli television.

One Arab government official, who asked not to be identified, said the steps available to Arab governments will be mainly symbolic and diplomatic--such as canceling relations and freezing the budding contacts between the Arab world and Israel. Arab governments as a bloc could also try to pressure the United States, Israel’s main ally and a co-sponsor of the Middle East peace process, to exert a moderating influence on Netanyahu, the official said.

The summit call was an achievement for Mubarak, who has taken the lead in trying to mediate inter-Arab tensions, particularly between Assad and Jordan’s King Hussein. Syria has been sharply critical of Jordan for its 1994 peace treaty with Israel and its warm relations with the Jewish state.

Distress over Netanyahu’s victory appears to have brought about a cohesion that has eluded the Arab world for the past six years.

The last full Arab summit took place in Cairo in August 1990 to try to persuade Iraq’s Hussein to pull out of Kuwait, which he had just invaded. The meeting failed, and most Arab countries ultimately sided with the United States to defeat the Iraqi leader.

After the war, Arab states were divided between those countries--such as Libya--that continued to reject any contact with Israel and those that were willing to begin normalizing contacts.