Jordan’s King, Clinton Make Little Progress

President Clinton, searching for ways to break the escalating cycle of Middle East violence, pledged Tuesday “personally to do anything I can” to save the peace process.

But talks with King Hussein here produced little in the way of movement or new ideas, according to U.S. and Jordanian officials. The Clinton administration instead is throwing the ball back into the Israeli and Palestinian court.

Clinton called on Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat on Tuesday to declare “zero tolerance” for terrorism as a “precondition to going forward.” The White House plans to press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week on how far he is prepared to go if all parties agree to scrap the rest of the process outlined in what is known as the Oslo agreement and skip straight to so-called final status talks.

In the last few days, Arafat has made several “encouraging” moves to deal with attacks on Israelis, the president said. But Clinton called for a “determination to do all that can reasonably be done” to create an atmosphere conducive to resuming negotiations.

“Arafat has to prove he cannot only get control but that he can then keep it,” said a senior U.S. official.

But in terms of initiatives, the real focus now is on Netanyahu, who is scheduled to travel to the United States this weekend to talk with American Jewish leaders. He is also likely to see Clinton on Monday to explore ways of getting the deadlocked peace process back on track, according to U.S. officials.

“The key is Bibi,” said a senior official, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “We need to find out if he’s really serious about accelerating the final status talks and whether he is really prepared to make the most critical decisions [in the peace process].”

A proposal by the Israeli leader would abandon two more phases of the Israeli withdrawal from small areas in the West Bank and move directly to the most disputed issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the status of Jerusalem and sovereignty for the Palestinians.

Hussein, who was briefed by Netanyahu last month, said that the Israeli prime minister thinks the Oslo agreement “creates certain difficulties” that current circumstances make harder rather than easier to solve.

“He thinks it might be a good idea to look at all issues of the final status within a certain time span to be agreed, while Oslo remains a reference and a fallback position,” the king told reporters.

Hussein said that he did not know how the process would work out but that, in light of the “approaching crisis,” the option “is worth looking at, I suppose.”

Pressed on whether Netanyahu has developed a strategy for peace, the king said the Israeli prime minister is still “feeling his way,” a process Hussein said is taking a “considerable amount of time at a dangerous point.”

Another idea making the rounds is to bring Israeli and key Arab leaders to Washington. Hussein said that growing bloodshed mandates action, but he warned that a dramatic gesture without guarantees of substantive progress could be a “disaster” that would ultimately hurt the process more than help it.

The king and other Arab leaders made clear that they hope the United States will play a more active role in the process. The “new phase” requires that Washington not be regarded simply as a “messenger” but increasingly as a power “shaping peace,” the king told reporters.

“Let’s hope that we’ll see a more active part played by the United States in the near future,” he said. “That’s what the new phase requires.”

But Hussein rejected the use of pressure on any party as a viable tactic because it no longer works. He called the nonbinding decision made by Arab League foreign ministers Sunday to suspend normalization of ties with Israel “a message of anger and despair” and said that he would not support it.