Egypt Recalls Its Ambassador to Israel

Egypt, the first Arab state to make peace with Israel and a key player in regional peacemaking efforts, recalled its ambassador to the Jewish state Tuesday, a diplomatic blow that deepened the sense here that the ongoing confrontation with the Palestinians is spiraling out of control.

The recall, which came the day after Israel rocketed Palestinian security targets in Gaza in retaliation for a Palestinian bomb attack on a school bus that left two Israelis dead, was only the second time Egypt has withdrawn its ambassador since it made peace with the Jewish state in 1979. The first recall came after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ordered Ambassador Mohammed Bassiouny to return immediately to Cairo “after the Israeli escalation of aggression against the Palestinians and their deliberate use of force against the Palestinian people,” the Egyptian news agency, MENA, quoted Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa as saying.

As violence surged in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the Clinton administration voiced its concern that the recall of Bassiouny, who has served in Tel Aviv for 18 years, will make it even more difficult to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to negotiations.

It is “now more critical than ever for those in the region who are committed to peace to remain engaged despite the difficulties and all the differences,” White House spokesman Jake Siewert said. Egypt is needed, he said, “to serve as a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Senior Israeli diplomats said they hope Jordan, the only other Arab state to have a peace treaty with Israel, will resist pressure to follow the Egyptian lead. But Tuesday night, Jordanian television carried a statement by Prime Minister Ali Abu Ragheb denouncing the attacks on the Palestinians in Gaza. Abu Ragheb said Jordan had stopped the accreditation process for its new ambassador to Israel and will keep the diplomat in Amman “until Israel ends its attacks and proves commitments toward the peace process.”

President Clinton spoke Tuesday to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about efforts to restore calm to the Middle East, the White House said.

“Both leaders agreed to continue working with both parties to try to break the ongoing cycle of violence,” said P. J. Crowley, spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, the Reuters news service reported. “There’s a recognition by both the president and the king that we’re in a dire situation.”

As the unrest continued Tuesday, an 18-year-old Jewish settler was shot and critically wounded as he traveled in a convoy down the road where the school bus was bombed a day earlier. He later died. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was visiting a nearby army base when the shooting occurred.

The Israeli army later demolished a Palestinian house, saying the gunman might have fired from it, and destroyed several acres of orchards near the road, where settlers have been fired on frequently in nearly eight weeks of Israeli-Palestinian clashes.

In the West Bank, settlers uprooted crops and stoned Palestinian houses near the city of Hebron. Inside Israel, hundreds of settlers blocked intersections, demanding tougher action against the Palestinians.

Five Palestinians were killed during violent demonstrations and gun battles with Israeli troops in the West Bank and Gaza, and a sixth died of wounds he suffered in Monday night’s missile attacks in Gaza, the Palestinians reported. More than 200 people, most of them Palestinians, have died in the fighting that has raged since Sept 28.

Barak said that he is unhappy with Egypt’s recall of its ambassador and hopes that it will be “short-lived.” But the Palestinians welcomed it on a day when Israel tightened its economic grip on Gaza by cutting off fuel supplies, dug deep ditches in West Bank roads to keep Palestinians from moving between villages and towns, and promised harsher moves to come.

The Egyptian ambassador’s withdrawal was “a critical message to the Arab nations, to the United States and to the international community that Israel has to pay the price of its aggression,” said Palestinian peace negotiator Hassan Asfour.

Another Palestinian official, Cabinet Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman, said that Israel had killed any hope of reviving peace talks and warned that Palestinian police will now fire on Israeli troops if they shoot at Palestinian demonstrators.

“From now on, the Palestinian Authority will defend itself in the face of this continuous aggression,” Rahman said at a Ramallah news conference. “Our policemen will now use their guns in self-defense in areas under our full sovereignty. They have the right to respond.”

In Jerusalem, Israeli commentators wrote that Monday’s bombing of the school bus and Israel’s retaliation had dragged the two sides closer to all-out war and further from any hope of resuming negotiations.

“A new round of this dead-end war was launched, more violent and more frightening than the previous ones,” political commentator Hemi Shalev wrote in the Hebrew daily Maariv.

Barak defended Israel’s attack on Palestinian Authority security targets, saying it was meant “to clarify that violence carries a price and that we shall accept no form of violence.”

But increasingly, Israel is finding that it, too, is paying a price for the confrontations. Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said Egypt’s recall of Bassiouny was “a pretty serious matter.” He said Israel will keep its ambassador in Egypt and try to persuade Mubarak to change his mind.

“We have suffered substantial diplomatic damage in the region,” said a senior Israeli diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the subject. “It’s a blow, and it will be difficult to reverse because the violence is creating open wounds and scars, not only between us and the Palestinians, but between us and the region. It is painful and worrying.”

In Amman, the Jordanian capital, Abdullah issued a statement Tuesday calling for an end to Israeli “aggression.”

“His majesty stressed the need for an immediate halt to ongoing Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people and the need to intensify international efforts to end the Israeli aggressive practices that threaten to destroy the hopes of peace in the region,” said the official news agency, Petra.

The king issued the statement after meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, who also met with Mubarak on Tuesday and was expected in Israel today, the last day of his nine-country tour of the region.

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said that Cohen is concerned that “the whole region is angry and upset about what is going on” and fears that the violence “will spread around the region” if it is not stopped.

“The safest thing to do is pull back,” Bacon said.