Mideast Conclave a Summit That May Not Have a High Point

This weekend’s meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat is no ordinary summit.

In an era when formal talks between heads of government rarely last more than a few hours, the Netanyahu-Arafat negotiations are marathon by comparison. And while summit meetings are usually among the most carefully choreographed events in the world of diplomacy, the outcome of the conclave at Wye Plantation in Maryland is far from certain.

Such occasions can quickly produce a nightmare for the cast of bureaucrats supporting each side: uncertainty and loss of control.

Almost anything can happen--and sometimes has.

The atmosphere can frost over before a meeting even starts, as it did in the mid-1950s when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles insulted his Chinese counterpart, Chou En-lai, at the outset of a conference on Indochina in Geneva by refusing to shake Chou’s outstretched hand.

Or events can lurch to the other extreme, with a leader offering excessive concessions. That almost occurred during the 1986 U.S.-Soviet summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, when President Reagan reportedly came close to accepting Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s offer to abolish nuclear weapons completely, a move that could have left the West exposed to Moscow’s vastly superior conventional forces.

Summit participants differ on what makes an unscripted, high-level meeting succeed. Common interests, personal chemistry, trust, courage, political change, effective mediation, shelter from media scrutiny and merely the necessary time to “ripen” an issue for settlement are variously cited as important ingredients.

But all observers seem to agree that summitry is more unpredictable art than absolute science.

“In the school of conflict resolution, all theories are problematic,” said Yossi Beilin, the former Israeli deputy foreign minister who helped launch the quiet, back-channel Arab-Israeli contacts that produced the 1993 Oslo peace accords. “The only law is that there is no ironclad law.”

While some of the ingredients for success seem to be present this weekend at Wye Plantation, others are hard to spot.

Acknowledgment of the other side’s legitimacy, something Beilin calls the fundamental prerequisite, is one example.

“You may disagree with someone, you may hate him, but if he exists, a whole checklist follows,” Beilin said. “He has the right to live his life, to earn money, to have security and many other things.”

In this respect, the handshake that brought Arafat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin together on the White House lawn five years ago was far more than a symbol. It was in itself a diplomatic breakthrough--in many ways the official public acknowledgment by an Israeli leader of Arafat’s existence.

Just how bogged down the Oslo process has become since that euphoric day is underscored by how unclear it is at Wye Plantation that this basic building block is still in place.

Just days before this weekend’s summit, Israel’s newly appointed foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, characterized Arafat as a murderer and vowed never to shake the Palestinian leader’s hand. Still, Netanyahu seems to have made that leap, albeit only recently. While it is widely believed that the Israeli leader has never had a Palestinian friend, he did share a meal for the first time with Arafat earlier this month.

So far at Wye, signals have been mixed. On Friday, the summit’s first full day, Netanyahu joined Arafat and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for a working lunch, but he declined an invitation to meet with the Palestinians and Americans for dinner that evening, the Jewish and Muslim Sabbath. As for Sharon, he isn’t showing up until today.

Beyond the predictable strains across the Arab-Israeli divide, personal chemistry at Wye is far from ideal. President Clinton and Netanyahu may get along, but there is little of the warmth that characterized the Rabin-Clinton relationship.

Although summit veterans say good personal chemistry between leaders can help, they acknowledge that its importance can be overrated.

“It doesn’t mean much,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Carter and a key player in the 1978 Camp David negotiations, a 13-day marathon that produced agreement between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Premier Menachem Begin.

“Begin and Sadat didn’t like each other, and Begin didn’t like Carter very much either, but everyone had an interest in agreement,” Brzezinski said. “Sadat wanted his land back, Begin wanted to split the Arabs, and the Americans wanted an accord.”

Effective mediation also can make a difference.

Brzezinski believes it was U.S. willingness to pressure Begin, coupled with a timely, not-so-subtle shove from the American host, that finally pushed the Camp David talks to a successful conclusion.

“I ordered my principal aide, William Quant, to start preparing a speech telling the American people why Camp David was a failure. And we weren’t going to mince words,” Brzezinski said. “We were prepared to say who was at fault: Begin.”

Begin eventually signed, urged on by his two senior aides, Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, who is now Israel’s president.

During his years in the White House, Clinton has shown a distinct reluctance to push Netanyahu. Washington observers believe that it would be politically difficult for Clinton to exert such pressure only a few weeks ahead of a U.S. general election.

Still, mediation can take many forms. During the secret talks that led to the Oslo accords, the late Norwegian Foreign Minister Johan Jorgen Holst and his team used informality as a subtle, yet successful, way to keep Palestinians and Israelis talking. At one point, Holst’s 4-year-old son got negotiators onto the living room floor to play during breaks in the talks.

In the end, however, it is the parties themselves who must decide.

“Outsiders can help develop a deal and increase the benefits of compromise or the costs of not agreeing,” said Richard Haass, a Middle East specialist in the Bush White House. “But they can’t make it on their own.”

Times staff writer Jim Mann in Washington contributed to this report.