Netanyahu Gives Albright Short Shrift

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, hoping to rouse the Mideast peace process from its coma before 1997 runs out, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu here Friday. But he seemed to give her no tangible grounds for optimism.

Albright, who is scheduled to meet with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat today, is seeking “substance, substance, substance,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said.

But after meeting with her for three hours, Netanyahu said he showed “no secret maps” to explain how much of the West Bank his government is now ready to hand back to the Palestinians.

Asked what progress, if any, had been made since the prime minister’s last encounter with Albright two weeks ago in London, a source close to Netanyahu said that in Paris, the Israeli leader enjoyed “a great onion soup.”

“We’ve had our problems. It’s not a secret,” Netanyahu told reporters of his widening differences with the Clinton administration, which snubbed the right-wing Israeli leader by not scheduling a White House visit last month during his most recent trip to the United States. “One doesn’t necessarily paper them over.”

For months, negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians have been stalled, with each side accusing the other of not living up to commitments that were supposed to guarantee the Palestinians a homeland and the Israelis a secure peace.

At a joint news conference with Netanyahu after their talks, Albright warned that time is not on the peacemakers’ side.

Today, she is to fly to Geneva to meet with Arafat, and she said she will emphasize last Sunday’s decision by the Israeli Cabinet to withdraw from more, though unspecified, areas in the West Bank. “We take it seriously, and he should take it seriously,” Albright said.

She said the Palestinians, for their part, must do more to persuade Israelis that any territories relinquished will not subsequently be used by terrorists targeting Jews.

“Security, and taking care of security, is a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job, and they have to make a 100% effort on this,” Albright said. “If Israel and the Palestinians are prepared to take bold decisions, we will be by their side every step of the way.”

Albright, who is supposed to begin a swing through Africa on Monday, juggled a busy schedule to shoehorn in the back-to-back sessions with Netanyahu and Arafat.

Some European observers have speculated that her initiative was motivated by the administration’s abject failure last month to enlist broad Arab backing for a possible renewed military strike at the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

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In many Arab capitals, the politically risky backing given Operation Desert Storm in 1991 was viewed as a tacit trade-off for U.S. pressure on Israel to hand back occupied lands to the Palestinians--a deal that has yet to pay off.

Last Sunday, the Israeli Cabinet approved further hand-overs of land, but without issuing a timetable or specifying how much the Palestinians can hope to control.

Israel’s Army Radio said the withdrawal of Israeli forces from 8% of the West Bank was being contemplated, a portion U.S. officials called too small.

Israel now fully controls 73% of the territory it seized from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast War and exercises security control in all but 3%. The Palestinians hope to get back 90%.

Trying to parry U.S. pressure for a quick turnover of a swath of land, Netanyahu on Friday noted that any decision could affect generations of Israelis.

The Israeli source said that Albright delivered no “ultimatums” to hasten a withdrawal and that Netanyahu offered no “schedules.”

After meeting earlier in the day with Lionel Jospin, France’s prime minister, Netanyahu said his government will watch for five months how territories finally earmarked for transfer are policed by Palestinian Authority officials before the Israeli army actually leaves.

That will guarantee, Netanyahu said, that “any territory handed over will not be a base for additional terrorism.”