Balanced U.S. Policy Paid Off, Officials Say

WASHINGTON — The latest Israeli-Palestinian agreement on the West Bank city of Hebron vindicated the Clinton administration’s evenhanded policy toward the two sides and demonstrated anew that in one of the world’s most strategic regions, little progress can be made without American help, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

For President Clinton, who hailed the agreement as “a good omen,” the pact seems to portend a far more active personal role as the Israelis and the Palestinians turn to the even more perplexing issues that lie ahead.

U.S. mediator Dennis Ross attended virtually every meeting that led to the Hebron accord, sometimes pressuring but mostly cajoling the lifelong antagonists on the Israeli and Palestinian sides to overcome the suspicion and distrust that prevented them for months from settling the relatively minor remaining issues.

Ross, who started playing the role of Middle East go-between during the Bush administration, plans to remain on the job in Clinton’s second term.

But U.S. officials and nongovernmental Mideast experts said Clinton and incoming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright must get involved soon to demonstrate the importance that Washington attaches to the negotiations.

A senior administration official said Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher spoke often by telephone with Ross, offering suggestions and encouragement as the talks dragged on. Clinton also called Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Sunday night when the negotiations were reaching a critical stage, urging him to persuade Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to go along with the agreement.

The official said Christopher sometimes talked to Ross five or six times a day. “The president was involved too, but the secretary’s involvement was greater by several orders of magnitude,” he said.

Although the Hebron agreement broke little new ground, it was, as one senior U.S. official put it, “a threshold crosser” because it was the first agreement ever reached between Palestinians and an Israeli government led by the right-wing Likud Party. Unlike some earlier Mideast peace agreements, the United States made no new promises of economic assistance to persuade the parties to close the deal.

U.S. officials had hoped that the pact would show each side that the other was able to make tough choices for peace. Judging from the dour looks on the faces of Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as they initialed the agreement, however, mutual distrust remains high. Still, the outcome demonstrated that the administration commands the respect of the Israelis and Palestinians. Although both sides accused Washington of favoring the other, U.S. officials were careful to avoid all but the gentlest criticism of either.

When Netanyahu announced last month that his government planned to increase subsidies for Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Clinton and other administration officials labeled the step an obstacle to peace.

Despite pointed calls for a more forceful condemnation from outside experts, including Middle East specialists from previous administrations, the president avoided an open break with Netanyahu. Officials said Wednesday that approach had paid off.

In the Arab world, where leaders had made Hebron a litmus test for Netanyahu’s intentions, reaction to the agreement was muted. But there were early signs that Arab countries may be ready to thaw frozen relations with the Likud government.

“This is a different man than the one who was campaigning and the one who formed the [Israeli] government,” said Jamil Mrowa, editor in chief of the English-language Daily Star in Beirut. “A different man will be treated differently.”

Although Netanyahu is often scornful of Arab opinion, there are signs that he had become increasingly concerned about the hostility of his Arab neighbors, especially Jordan and Egypt, the two countries that have signed peace treaties with Israel.

“The prime minister understands that the relationship with the Arab world is basically frozen,” a senior U.S. official said shortly before the Hebron agreement was completed. “The warm peace with Jordan is turning cooler. The relationship with Egypt has gotten colder. Trade with the Arab world has virtually stopped. All of these things are damaging to Netanyahu and provide an incentive to him to do something to establish trust.”

At two crucial junctures in the drawn-out Hebron negotiations, Jordan’s King Hussein intervened, urging the Israelis and the Palestinians to settle.

For Jordan, the talks were vital because a central issue was whether Netanyahu’s Likud government would honor agreements signed by previous Labor Party-led governments of the late Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Jordan’s own peace treaty was signed with Labor, and the king clearly did not want to see any erosion of Netanyahu’s commitment to agreements reached by his Labor predecessor.

U.S. mediators welcomed Hussein’s intervention, but the Hashemite monarch’s efforts may not be enough in the next round of talks.

“There will be no serious progress in Middle East talks unless the president and the new secretary of state become personally engaged in the negotiations,” said Edward P. Djerejian, the State Department’s top Middle East specialist in the Bush administration and the start of the Clinton administration.

“We saw that at critical moments of these talks, King Hussein was brought in to broker the deal. But at the end of the day it has to be the president of the United States.”

Most Arab governments greeted the accord with relief and approval, not only because of Hebron but because it seemed to mark Netanyahu’s conversion to the camp of defenders, not destroyers, of the tenuous peace accords reached at Oslo in 1993.

“Behind the drama of eleventh-hour diplomacy, I would argue, our region is witnessing slow, historic transformations and ideological shifts,” wrote Jordanian commentator Rami Khouri, who detected “early signs of the triumph of pragmatism, and the end of absolutism in both Zionism and Arabism.”

Still, the Islamic extremist group Hamas, in a statement issued in Lebanon, rejected the agreement outright, saying that it marked a Palestinian surrender.

Syria and Iran also both voiced skepticism. Iran called it “another defeat,” while the Syrian government newspaper Al Thawra said it was intended only to save face for the Israeli leadership.

Kempster reported from Washington and Daniszewski from Beirut.