U.S. Is Now Third Party to Mideast Peace Accord

Having successfully mediated the Wye Plantation summit, the Clinton administration now must assume a much more demanding role as a combination referee-therapist responsible for making sure the Israelis and Palestinians carry out their complex new agreement.

In a sense, the deal hammered out during nine days of intensive negotiations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore restores Washington’s traditional position as Middle East intermediary, a part President Clinton had been wary of playing for most of his second term.

“Like it or not, the administration has signed on to essentially hold the hands of the parties as we move forward,” Middle East expert Richard Haass said Saturday.

Fulfilling this role will not be easy. The administration’s mantra has been: “We can’t want peace more than the parties do.”

From now on, however, even if the parties seem to tire of peacemaking, Washington will have to take the steps needed to secure compliance, even if that requires a confrontation with Israel, the Palestinians or both.

Clinton, who has relied throughout his political career on the American Jewish community for votes and campaign contributions, has been reluctant to engage in controversy with Israel.

Yet the president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly confronted each other at times during the Wye summit. Although there is no way of knowing if that friction will affect the overall relationship, Clinton spoke directly to the volatile politics in Israel that could derail Netanyahu when he said at a Beverly Hills fund-raiser Saturday: “I hope in Israel the people of his coalition will support Prime Minister Netanyahu.”

The Wye declaration requires the United States to do even more to promote Israeli-Arab rapprochement than Washington has been accustomed to doing for the past three decades.

Most notably, the CIA has been assigned the job of supervising security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians, in effect overseeing the Palestinian justice system to ensure that terrorists are arrested and punished and, conversely, to prevent police brutality and false imprisonment by the fledgling Palestinian Authority.

More subtly, but probably more important, the United States will be expected to interpret the complex clauses of the peace accord, goading the parties to live up to their part of the bargain and persuading each side to continue implementing the agreement even when one believes the other’s compliance has fallen short.

The U.S. role will be crucial during the next three months, the period for Israel’s gradual withdrawal from an additional 13% of the West Bank in exchange for Palestinian cooperation in defending Israel’s security.

“It will be the equivalent of three months of an extended Wye conference,” said Haass, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “On an almost daily basis you will have implementation questions. Everything is conditional. There are parallel tracks of Israeli and Palestinian implementation.”

Uri Savir, head of the Peres Institute for Peace in Israel and a veteran Israeli negotiator, said the Wye agreement turned Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking “into a trilateral relationship including the United States.”

When the United States successfully mediated the Israeli-Palestinian dispute over the West Bank city of Hebron in January 1997, the accords fixed a number of responsibilities for both parties. But neither side fulfilled all its obligations, and many of the steps that were required by the Hebron accords were adopted anew at the Wye Plantation.

Middle East experts say the administration must shoulder some of the blame for the failure of the Hebron agreement. These experts say Washington must avoid those mistakes this time around.

As difficult as it may be for the administration to ensure compliance with the Wye Plantation agreements, it probably will prove to be the easiest task Washington now faces.

As soon as the accords are ratified, Israel and the Palestinians have pledged to begin negotiations about a final peace treaty. Those final-status talks must tackle emotional issues that have been swept under the rug--an independent Palestinian state, borders, division of water resources, return of Palestinian refugees and the regional Gordian knot--the status of Jerusalem.

Israelis generally consider Clinton to be the most pro-Israel president ever. But Clinton’s relationship with Netanyahu has always been a bit rocky. The administration made no secret of its support for then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres in the 1996 Israeli election that Netanyahu won.

Both sides were angered by incidents during the Wye summit. When Netanyahu threatened to walk out of the talks Wednesday, U.S. officials accused him of cheap theatrics. And Netanyahu and his aides accused Clinton of double-crossing them by first agreeing to free Jonathan Jay Pollard, convicted of spying for Israel, and then snatching the agreement off the table. U.S. officials denied this, and Israeli officials later conceded that indeed there never was a firm deal.

No one knows yet whether the summit friction will make it easier or more difficult for Clinton to adopt the sort of even-handed approach that ultimately will be necessary if the United States is to fulfill its new responsibilities under the pact.

Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Tracy Wilkinson and Times staff writer Janet Hook in Washington contributed to this report.

* PRESIDENTIAL CLOUT: The Wye conference showed that Clinton is still a major player on the world stage. A12

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