Sharon’s Washington Trip Will Test U.S. and Israel as Partners

The United States and Israel, allies for half a century, face a tough test of their partnership in the Mideast peace process when President Bush plays host to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the White House this week.

Although still firmly united in outlook, they have emerged from events over the last month with sharply different visions of how to end the violence that threatened to engulf the Middle East.

“Support for Israel and Sharon is as solid as it’s ever been, and there’s a lot of affinity in principle, but we do diverge on several points,” said a senior State Department official involved in the sensitive diplomacy.

In order to inject new energy into the process, Bush has made the bold and somewhat risky decision to accelerate it, moving swiftly to the tough political issues of a final settlement and in effect planning to relaunch negotiations at an international conference, possibly as early as next month.

Bush has also embraced an Arab initiative to recognize Israel, offered moderate Arab leaders a role in the process and brought in the European Union, Russia and the United Nations as partners.

Sharon is leaving for Washington armed with a plan that he hopes will counter Bush’s proposals. According to his aides, Sharon intends to argue, when he meets with the president Tuesday, that after 19 months of bloodshed, Israelis are unable to contemplate negotiating a final settlement with the Palestinians for years to come.

Although Sharon originally proposed a regionwide meeting, he intends to tell Bush that Israel has no interest in a conference “where Israel might find itself on one side of the table, with the Arabs, the Europeans and God knows who else on the other side, with only the Americans somewhere in between,” said Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and Sharon’s foreign policy advisor.

This “is something that Israel has always opposed, and it will not let itself be dragged into such a thing,” he added.

While Sharon is intrigued by an eight-point Saudi Arabian plan to end the conflict, the prime minister also will make clear his reservations about it, aides say. He will propose instead that the Bush administration broker talks on long-term interim arrangements.

Bush and Sharon do agree on a two-state solution to the most critical issue. Both broke historic ground after they took office last year by formally pledging to support the creation of a Palestinian state.

But U.S. and Israeli positions diverge on the timing of that state’s creation and its size. They also disagree on what rights Israel might have over the interim Palestinian Authority. And they have serious differences about what should be the fate of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories.

The gap is most conspicuous regarding Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. Bush has reluctantly concluded that Arafat must be included in any peacemaking effort, at least for now.

“We don’t have a whole lot of faith in Arafat. But at the same time, there isn’t any alternative,” said the senior State Department official. “He was chosen legitimately, if not totally democratically, by the Palestinians. We can’t pick the leader. So our view is that he needs to be pushed, and we have to rebuild the Palestinian Authority based on democracy and transparency.”

But Sharon is bringing a 100-page dossier purporting to prove Arafat’s ties to terrorism. It includes documents the Israeli army says were confiscated from Arafat’s headquarters and other Palestinian offices during Israel’s incursion into the West Bank, as well as purported testimony from Arafat lieutenant Marwan Barghouti, who was captured by Israel on April 15. Israel says the material proves Arafat financed and knew about militants’ attacks on Israelis--a charge Palestinians deny.

The dossier underscores Sharon’s goal of isolating Arafat and finding other Palestinian leaders to work with. Israeli officials say Sharon believes he can reshape the Palestinian Authority into something more to his liking than the administration Arafat built over eight years, most of which is now in ruins.

But U.S. officials say they plan to remind Sharon of Israel’s attempt to foster an alternative to the nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization by encouraging Palestinians in the 1970s to turn to their religion. One result was the growth of Hamas, one of three extremist groups behind the recent spate of suicide bombings in Israel.

Israel is also unwilling to comply with growing international efforts to move quickly to a final settlement of the conflict. Sharon plans to propose small incremental steps, with each move dependent on the completion of the previous one. The goals include disarming Palestinian militias, reestablishing Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation and restoring commercial ties.

“If we interpret correctly the administration’s intentions, the aim of both the U.S. and Israel will be to define goals and not specific timetables,” Shoval said. “It is practically impossible to set a timetable, certainly not for permanent solutions. It would be counterproductive to try to do so.”

In the meantime, Sharon appears to have no intention of agreeing to Bush’s demand that Israel refrain from reentering West Bank areas it has left. The Israeli army says such incursions are the only way it can thwart Palestinian attacks.

But U.S. officials think the results of Israel’s incursion prove that there can be no military solution to the conflict. The offensive might even prove to have been counterproductive long-term. Militants have been hurt, but some will be able to regroup, these officials predict.

Trying to reconcile the U.S. and Israeli visions will be the “biggest challenge of Bush’s foreign policy,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staffer during the Reagan administration.

“There are no black-and-white issues like there were after Sept. 11, when he had the country and the world united behind him. This is a much messier tapestry and a real test of Bush’s leadership as he’s being pulled in different directions by other countries and Congress.”

Administration officials say Sharon should find the new U.S. approach appealing.

Unlike the heads of past administrations, Bush wants a regional process that would ultimately secure peace not just with Israel’s four immediate neighbors but with all 22 members of the Arab League. A meeting last month between Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who initiated the Arab League peace offer, was “very much of a breakthrough in building Arab support. Sharon should find this attractive,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Washington is now determined to ensure that a new Palestinian state is built on democratic and free-market principles.

“I can’t imagine that Israel will not find that attractive,” the official said.

Bush believes that he is building an important new context for the peace process.

“We’re certainly going to hear Sharon out, but the president has provided a broad outline of what he thinks needs to happen, and we’re not going to back away from that,” the official added.

Because of the war on terrorism, the prism through which Bush views the conflict differs from how it was seen by past administrations. The president wholeheartedly backs Sharon’s goal of eliminating terrorist threats. But he thinks that quickly achieving a political solution would provide the best hope for peace. He also has begun to see the Arab-Israeli conflict as a threat to his global counter-terrorism campaign.

“Bush is now aware that the situation in the Mideast is much more precarious for U.S. interests than he had thought,” said James Hoge, editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. “This could be a session in which Bush spends more time telling Sharon that he’s got to get in line with this conference, quite unlike the last time, when Sharon spent more time educating Bush about his security problems.”

The White House has already tried to lower expectations for the planned peace conference, which Bush on Friday labeled only a series of meetings.

“It’s just a series of ongoing discussions to help solidify the visions that have been expressed by not only the United States but the Europeans--but more importantly, the visions expressed by Israel [and] Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia,” Bush said. “And so there are going to be a lot of discussions and a lot of meetings.”

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Wright reported from Washington and Curtius from Jerusalem. Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.