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ISRAELI POLITICAL REALITY AND THE SEARCH FOR MIDDLE EAST PEACE Samuel W. Lewis Xn THE WANING WEEKS OF SHIMON PERES'S TENURE as prime minister of Israel, Israeli diplomacy gyrated at a near-fever pitch in an effort to relaunch the long stalled, oft-denigrated "peace process."Jaundiced Israeli political observers expected few concrete results, and their skepticism was well-founded. Yet Peres's surprise meeting with Morocco's King Hassan inJuly 1986 and his long-delayed "summit meeting" in Alexandria with Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak two months later provided some evidence that the road to negotiations might be reopened with enough Israeli persistence and determination. Peres was able to pay his final call as prime minister on President Reagan in mid-September 1986 in a glow of satisfaction that the "Taba roadblock" had finally been rolled away. Mubarak would now, finally, appoint a new ambassador to Israel, after leaving the post vacant for four years. Peres also had reason to believe that Mubarak would now endorse joint efforts to inject more warmth and "normality" into Israel's peace with Egypt. Nonetheless, the joint statement issued by Peres and Mubarak revealed in its vacuity their continued disagreement about how to proceed on the core issue of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, the future of the West Bank and Gaza. Declaring 1987 as "a year of negotiations for peace," the Israeli and Egyptian leaders reportedly agreed only to establish ajoint committee to prepare the ground for some unspecified form of international peace conference. Even this modest agreement evoked immediate and vigorous dissent from foreign minister Yitzchak Shamir and his Samuel W. Lewis served from 1977 to 1985 as U.S. ambassador to Israel. He is now retired from the Foreign Service and is currently diplomat-in-residence at TheJohns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute at SAIS. Ambassador Lewis spent June to August 1986 as senior fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. 67 68 SAIS REVIEW colleagues in the Likud party. Shamir switched posts with Peres in midOctober , and it fell to him to follow through on this process, hardly a promising prospect. Jordan's Prime Minister Zeid al-Rifai professed bafflement in commenting on this proposed "preparatory committee" and the Alexandria Summit's outcome. Moreover, a potential role for the Soviet Union at any such conference remains an unresolved and highly contentious issue. Jordan's King Hussein insists that the Soviet Union must be invited, along with the other four permanent UN Security Council members. Mubarak agrees, though with considerably less fervor. For their part, Peres and Shamir both insist, with Reagan's agreement, that only nations that maintain diplomatic relations with Israel should be allowed to participate, meaning that neither the Soviet Union nor China could come without, in effect, buying a ticket! Peres also stresses Israel's insistence that any international conference be merely a symbolic device to cloak direct, face-to-face peace negotiations between Israel andJordanor Israel and Syria, in the unlikely event that Syria changed its position on negotiations. The United States backs up Israeli calls for direct negotiations , even as U.S. emissaries continue episodically to play roles as thirdparty mediators between Jerusalem and Amman, as well as other Arab capitals. Had Peres gone further than he did on these issues with either Mubarak or Hussein, or had he disagreed with President Reagan about the proper Soviet role in Middle East diplomacy, he would have ignited a political fire storm at home. IN THE SPRING OF 1984, embarking on his third national political campaign as leader of the Labor party, Shimon Peres had good reason to believe those public opinion polls that showed Labor far ahead of prime minister Shamir's tired, dispirited Likud party. Accelerating hyperinflation and the murderous quagmire of Lebanon, in which Israel's armed forces were still bogged down, had disillusioned many voters about the Likud, which was no longer able to fall back on former prime minister Menachem Begin's magic rhetoric. But victory would for a third time elude Peres. The voters returned a negative verdict on Likud but gave Labor too narrow a margin for it to form a government with...

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