Europe Seeks Role in Mideast Peace Effort

With the U.S. position as primary Middle East power broker possibly in jeopardy for the first time in more than two decades, President Clinton said Tuesday that it is up to Israel and the Palestinians “to decide whether they’re willing to let the peace process go forward.”

Speaking to a news conference a day after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that administration aides described as often difficult, Clinton offered only the most perfunctory expression of hope that the Middle East stalemate will end any time soon.

“We are prepared to do whatever we can,” Clinton said, without hinting what that might be. Then he urged reporters not to conclude “that I think there’s no chance that we’ll get it going again.”

“In the end,” he added, “it still depends on what it always has depended on. And that is the parties’ taking responsibility to take the risks for peace.”

In the past, Israel and its Arab adversaries seldom have taken those risks without a combination of encouragement and pressure from Washington. In his meeting with Clinton on Monday and at a subsequent news conference, Netanyahu asserted that his government will make no additional concessions, maintaining that it already has done all it can be expected to do. And Palestinian officials, expressing disillusionment with U.S. mediation, have been turning to Europe for support.

Palestinian representatives adopted a wait-and-see attitude after Netanyahu’s Monday session. Hasan Abdel-Rahman, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s representative in Washington, and Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, minister of higher education in Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Cabinet, met at the State Department on Tuesday with Dennis B. Ross, the administration’s Middle East trouble-shooter. The meeting was in advance of talks expected later this week between U.S. officials and a senior Palestinian delegation.

After the meeting, Ashrawi said Arafat will consider a summit meeting with Netanyahu if such a meeting is needed. At the same time, she said of the Israelis: “One side cannot behave like an occupier and like a dictator.”

Meanwhile, France asserted a new role for itself and the European Union in Middle East peacemaking, explaining that the Palestinians had appealed to the Europeans to get involved.

In an interview with a French newspaper, copies of which were faxed to reporters in Washington by the French Embassy, Foreign Minister Herve de Charette said: “The Mideast peace process is in an extremely serious and probably unprecedented state of crisis. In this situation of quasi-rupture, we have noted for the first time a pressing appeal by the Palestinians for Europe to do its part. Europe must play an active role by exerting the necessary pressure for the resumption of the peace process.”

Although the United States and France are allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, their diplomacy often has been at cross purposes. France and many other European countries are traditionally more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to Israel.

If France and its European allies were to become more deeply involved in the peace process, the result could become a competition of big powers, with the United States backing Israel and the Europeans supporting the Palestinians.