Peace Talks Intensify as Clinton Returns

With President Clinton again presiding over Mideast peace talks at Camp David, negotiations moved into high gear Sunday, as Clinton met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in discussions expected to stretch far into the night.

“The president is back, he’s ready to go,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

Returning to the talks after an almost four-day absence, Clinton met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak even before being briefed by his senior advisors, Boucher said. Clinton then met with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Clinton arrived at the mountaintop retreat in the early evening after a brief stop at the White House. The president had left the negotiations early Thursday to attend the Group of 8 summit of the world’s leading economic powers and Russia on the Japanese island of Okinawa.

In the Middle East, meanwhile, hard-liners on both sides warned Barak and Arafat against compromising on what appeared to be the key remaining issue in the talks: the status of Jerusalem.

Two politicians who deserted Barak’s Cabinet on the eve of the summit said Sunday that they had received telephone calls from the prime minister late Saturday and early Sunday. Former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky and National Religious Party member Yitzhak Levy said they warned Barak against making a deal that would in any way affect Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem.

Levy said he warned Barak that Barak was in danger of falling into a “historic trap” by accepting an “imposed arrangement.” Turning any part of Jerusalem over to the Palestinians, Levy said, would “leave a deep wound in the heart of the people that will not be forgotten or forgiven.”

Levy, who had served as housing minister until he quit the Cabinet, represents religious Zionist Jews and is especially influential in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some of the settlements would probably be dismantled under any agreement.

The seemingly intractable issue of Jerusalem nearly derailed the summit last week. Barak has pledged to keep the holy city united. The Palestinians have said they will sign an agreement only if it gives them full sovereignty over the city’s eastern sector.

But Barak associates said over the weekend that Israel might accept a compromise proposal that would extend limited Palestinian sovereignty to parts of East Jerusalem.

Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, an architect of the breakthrough 1993 accords that laid the groundwork for the now 13-day-old Camp David talks, on Sunday led a tour that included reporters through traditionally Arab East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel during the 1967 Middle East War. During the tour, Beilin reiterated his long-standing position that it is time for Israel to give up control of some outlying Palestinian neighborhoods.

“What is most important is to see the lack of importance and meaning of these villages for Israel. They fall outside the core of our Jerusalem, and we have to differentiate between our Jerusalem and the Jerusalem that is not ours and never was,” Beilin said.

In the Arab world, pressure appeared to build on Arafat to resist concessions on Jerusalem. Major Arab newspapers throughout the region were filled with commentary warning against compromise.

Reflecting the intensity of the summit and the feelings surrounding it, the heads of two security and intelligence services briefed ministers attending Sunday’s Cabinet session in Jerusalem on alleged death threats against Barak and Arafat from right-wing extremists, according to a participant at the meeting.

Dalia Itzik, environment minister, told state radio that Avraham Dichter, head of the Shin Bet security service, reported detecting the threats. Itzik said the threats at this point did not amount to specific plots but were verbal.

The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Jew angered by the peace accords that Rabin had signed two years earlier. The incident has left security officials in Israel especially sensitive to threats.

An Israeli official said early Sunday that it should become clear shortly after Clinton’s arrival whether negotiators could hope for a breakthrough in the talks. But later in the day, in a switch emblematic of the ambiguity swirling around the negotiations, he backed away from his prediction.

“President Clinton will return to Camp David . . . and then we will see if there’s any point in staying here and going on with the talks or to pack the luggage and return home,” Gadi Baltiansky, Barak’s spokesman, told Army Radio in a telephone interview from near Camp David.

A few hours later, however, in an interview with The Times, Baltiansky said he had “no idea when it will become clear that we are ready to conclude the talks.”

Baltiansky told The Times that Barak had spent much of the weekend alone in his cabin weighing the choices before him.

“Obviously,” Baltiansky said, “we can’t stay here forever.”

In Clinton’s absence, the pace of the talks had slowed, with negotiators meeting in informal groups. The Palestinian and Israeli leaders left the retreat for the first time since the talks began, each on separate outings with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Arafat had lunch Saturday with Albright at her farm in Hillsboro, Va. They discussed the peace process and other issues, Boucher said.

On Sunday morning, Albright took Barak on a tour of the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, Pa. An official White House photo showed Barak, a former Israeli army chief of staff, examining a Civil War-era cannon.

The talks have also attracted the attention of Pope John Paul II. On Sunday, he repeated the long-held Vatican position that the future status of Jerusalem should include international guarantees preserving the sacred nature of the city.

“The Holy See still thinks that only a special status with international safeguards can effectively preserve the most sacred parts of the holy city and guarantee religious freedom for all the faithful in the region and the world, who see Jerusalem as a crossroads of peace and unity,” the pontiff told thousands of pilgrims outside his summer residence south of Rome.