Clinton Accents Positive as Counterparts Scowl

The East Room of the White House was the scene Wednesday of a particularly uncomfortable moment in Bill Clinton’s presidency.

He tried to claim progress in talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders over the previous 36 hours, when in fact there was virtually none. And it was evident that the tension remained.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat sat behind him, looking as dour as an estranged couple after a court-ordered visit to a marriage counselor.

Clinton, seldom at a loss for words, struggled to explain why the two ordinarily voluble Middle East leaders would not speak for themselves nor take questions before a global audience.

Near the end of the midafternoon news conference, the president was straining so badly that Vice President Al Gore signaled to White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry to bring the painful event to a quick and merciful close.

Clinton took three more questions, finally blurting out that letting Arafat or Netanyahu speak could possibly make a difficult situation worse.

Although U.S. officials said that the three hours of private talks between Netanyahu and Arafat on Tuesday marked significant progress, they could point to no concrete result from the two-day summit.

The controversial tunnel, which hugs the western foundation of the area known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al Sharif, was still open. Israeli troops still occupied the West Bank city of Hebron. Palestinians and Israelis remained at dagger’s point.

Clinton said this week’s talks had helped to establish “a higher level of trust” between the parties than had existed before the meeting. Netanyahu said that he understood Arafat better, even as he signaled to his domestic audience that he did not like him any better and had not yielded an inch.

“I think these two days give us a new beginning, but I don’t have any illusions,” Netanyahu said at his own news conference after the White House meeting.

Despite his hours of private conversations with Arafat, Netanyahu continued his practice of referring to the Palestinian leader without title, simply as “Arafat.”

Arafat left Washington on Wednesday night without saying a word in public.

Some analysts in Israel portrayed the meeting as a clear victory for Netanyahu, who managed to leave Washington without making concessions that would have proved troublesome among his conservative constituents, and a defeat for Arafat, who gained no promises to resolve the issues that triggered the trouble in the first place.

“I think Mr. Clinton is wrong to say we are better off than we were before,” said Khalil Shikaki, director of the Center for Palestinian Research and Studies in the West Bank town of Nablus. “You had three Mideast leaders in the presence of the only remaining superpower, and they failed to come up with a single agreement on a single issue. This is very bleak.”

Netanyahu and Arafat met face to face much of Tuesday afternoon, but the discussion never went beyond the level of generalities, officials reported. Israeli and Palestinian aides worked through the night at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, but by morning had nothing to show for their efforts.

“There were a couple of moments in the night when there was a feeling of possible agreement,” said Natan Sharansky, the Israeli trade minister, who accompanied Netanyahu to Washington. Sharansky added that by dawn it became clear that the issues were far too complex to tackle under such deadline pressure.

Netanyahu left the White House having paid no price in his relationship with Washington for his hard-line policies and those of his Likud Party. Clinton was loath to press the Israeli leader for concessions, knowing that such pressure would bring charges of betrayal of a close ally from his Republican challenger, Bob Dole.

Mahmoud Zahar, a leader of the militant Palestinian Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip, said that the results were exactly what Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak foresaw--and why he declined Clinton’s personal appeal to attend the Washington conference.

“Israel in the Likud era sees the negotiations as a means to waste time and minimize the tension, and Israel plays the game very well,” Zahar said.

Like others in Israel and the United States, Zahar predicted a new round of violence if talks scheduled to begin Sunday on the Israeli-Gaza Strip border fail to show rapid progress.

Times staff writer Marjorie Miller in Jerusalem contributed to this story.