Arab Allies Optimistic on Bush Plan

Three Arab foreign ministers said Thursday that they had found some common ground with the Bush administration on the broad outlines of a plan to settle the Middle East conflict within three years, but their optimism was tempered with grave doubt that any peace plan can be implemented on today’s blood-soaked ground.

“We feel much more positive ... that there is a commitment to the endgame, and a time frame,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher said after meetings with President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Bush said “more than five times” that he was very serious about ensuring that all sides in the conflict met their obligations, Muasher said.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said Egypt would be willing to retrain Palestinian police officers to keep order in West Bank cities--but only after Israel pulls out. Muasher said the Bush administration expressed no objections to that offer.

Muasher, Maher and the foreign minister of another moderate Arab nation, Saudi Arabia, came to Washington to try to shape the still-sketchy vision, first outlined by Bush in a June 24 speech, to establish side-by-side Israeli and Palestinian states within three years. Specific provisions of the plan were not released Thursday, but Arab and U.S. officials indicated that they had set aside many of their differences and were determined to move ahead with parallel talks on political, security, economic and humanitarian aspects of the crisis.

“It’s better than people might have expected, but by no means a breakthrough,” said Edward S. Walker Jr., president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based study center, and a former ambassador to the region. The agreement in principle envisions two side-by-side states, with Israeli withdrawal to its 1967 borders, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and some swap of contested territories, Walker said. But it glosses over thorny differences over the status of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and the sequence of the steps toward peace.

According to Muasher, the Arab diplomats discussed with Bush the need to have Israel withdraw from the occupied territories in time to prepare for Palestinian elections, to be held in January. He said the administration “understands that you cannot have elections with an occupation.”

The diplomats agreed with Bush on the need for the Arab allies to help the Palestinians carry out reforms and put in place a security structure that would make it possible for Israel to withdraw from the occupied West Bank without inviting a wave of suicide bombings. But they stressed the need for the Israelis to attend immediately to the hunger and privation that Palestinians have suffered since the reoccupation.

Prince Saud al Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said Bush had promised to use his influence with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. But in an often-expressed Arab view of the dim hopes for a deal with the current Israeli government, Saud added: “I would be more optimistic if Sharon were not there. In Sharon’s view, a good Arab is a dead Arab.”

However, he said that all of the Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, that have claimed responsibility for suicide bombings were “all working on a paper that has all the conditions that they will subscribe to for stopping the fighting.”

Israeli Embassy spokesman Mark Regev said Israel has “agreed to play our part” in alleviating the crisis but had cut off talks scheduled with moderate Palestinians “while we bury our dead” from the two suicide bombings this week.

“When we have attacks like this--and we had two in two days--we don’t say ‘business as usual,’ ” Regev said.

In response to a question, Bush said: “I’m beginning to think that every time we have a high-level meeting, something happens--it’s not coincidental. I think the enemies of peace try to send signals, try to derail peace and try to discourage us. And ... we refuse to be discouraged. We’re going to continue to work for peace.”

The question of how to set up a Palestinian security force is just one of the chicken-and-egg questions that is likely to face all sides in the weeks to come.

Regev said Israel has encouraged moderate Arab states to play a role in helping the Palestinians control terrorists in their midst, including training a new police force, but will not pull out without a security structure in place.

“Israel does not want to stay in the Palestinian cities one hour more than we need to, but the question is whether when we leave, the terrorist groups will once again be the law,” Regev said.

But Egypt’s Maher said it would be impossible to establish any security force until the Israelis leave.

“We cannot help recruit and train [Palestinian police officers] if every time we train these people the Israelis come and arrest them because they are carrying weapons,” Maher said. Nor would Egypt offer any guarantee--other than its goodwill and prestige--that new suicide bombers would not go forth from cities policed by Palestinians, he said.