King Hussein Enters Mideast Peace Talks

With the Wye Plantation summit approaching what U.S. officials termed the “end game,” President Clinton got help in his effort to close the deal Tuesday when Jordan’s ailing King Hussein--the Middle East’s ultimate survivor--joined the talks.

Hussein, in the United States for cancer treatment at the Mayo Clinic, arrived by helicopter at midday to urge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to make the final compromises necessary for a new Middle East peace agreement.

“He has the unique ability to bring home to the delegations the importance of making the tough choices necessary to achieve peace,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said of Hussein, who has been on the Hashemite throne for almost half a century.

Hussein has close and generally friendly ties to both Israel and the Palestinians, although he fought wars with the Israelis in 1967 and with the Palestinians in 1970. And from time to time, his relations with both Netanyahu and Arafat have been strained.

Rubin said the Clinton administration hoped to take advantage of Hussein’s “charisma . . . his special role in the past . . . the extensively warm feelings that people have for him” to help bring Netanyahu and Arafat to agreement.

But even before the monarch joined the talks, U.S. officials said serious end-of-summit bargaining began. The officials dated the change in mood to a two-hour meeting of Clinton, Netanyahu and Arafat on Monday night, followed by a long working dinner involving top officials of all three delegations. It was the first face-to-face talks between the Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian leader since Friday.

“People are rushing around, trying to come up with bridging ideas and ways to resolve existing problems rather than rebutting talking points,” Rubin said. Paradoxically, the terrorist grenade attack earlier this week in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, which at first seemed to throw a wrench into the works, might have started the drive to complete the talks.

Late Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart announced that Clinton will travel to California this weekend to keep the political dates, originally scheduled for Tuesday and today, that he postponed to stay with the Wye Plantation talks.

Lockhart said the president will fly to Los Angeles on Saturday and attend a fund-raiser for congressional candidate Janice Hahn. Later, he will attend a reception and a dinner for Sen. Barbara Boxer. On Sunday, he will attend events in San Francisco for Boxer and other California lawmakers.

Israeli and U.S. officials said many of the most difficult issues at the summit have been settled, although some loose ends remain, and all sides cautioned that understandings already reached could yet come unraveled.

“Even when you are 90% there, that 10% can blow the whole thing,” a U.S. official said.

Nevertheless, Hussein’s arrival added a new sense of drama.

“I think King Hussein is pleased to be here to add his voice and add his wisdom and unique perspective to the talks,” Lockhart said. “The president is gratified the king could come here because the president recognizes the king’s unique place in the Middle East.”

Hussein wears his role of regional elder statesmen with panache these days. He played a key mediator role in the January 1997 negotiations that led to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement on the future of the West Bank city of Hebron, the last substantive pact between the antagonists before the Wye Plantation talks.

In his earlier years, the 62-year-old king was an enemy of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

In 1967, Hussein joined Egypt, Syria and other Arab states in the war against Israel that resulted in a stunning Israeli victory. Jordan lost the West Bank, which is the territorial focus of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

After the Six-Day War, Palestinians poured out of the Israeli-occupied West Bank into Jordan. Led by Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, the Palestinians tried to establish a parallel government in Jordan that Hussein regarded as a mortal threat to his rule.

In September 1970--known to this day by the Palestinians as Black September--the Jordanian army overran the Palestinian refugee camps, crushing the PLO headquarters and forcing many refugees to move to Lebanon.

In 1978, Hussein refused to attend the Camp David peace talks that produced the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt and serve as a prototype for U.S. objectives at Wye Plantation. However, in 1994 Jordan signed its own peace treaty with Israel, becoming the second Arab state to do so.

Last year, when Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency botched an assassination in Jordan’s capital, Amman, Hussein did not conceal his fury at Netanyahu. The king refused even to take an apologetic telephone call from the prime minister. Later, Hussein agreed to meet with Ariel Sharon, now Israel’s foreign minister, in a session that papered over the dispute.

U.S. officials declined to speculate on Hussein’s health, although he appeared worn as a result of extensive chemotherapy.

On Sunday, after the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot quoted U.S. officials as saying that Hussein was “terminal” and that his brother and heir apparent, Crown Prince Hassan, was an inadequate replacement, the State Department issued a formal denial of the report.

“King Hussein has been very open about his battle with cancer,” the department said. “We look forward to his full recovery. . . . We have great confidence in Crown Prince Hassan, who has been and remains a very able partner for King Hussein, as well as for the United States.”