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In fact, according to a senior Administration official, the announcement was a diplomatic charade: Shamir had agreed to attend the peace conference before Baker left Moscow. The Israeli leader's acquiescence was prompted in part by a Soviet promise to re-establish diplomatic relations, which were severed in 1967, if the talks get under way. Baker also assured him that the U.S. would not insist that Palestinians unacceptable to Shamir be included in the discussions.
But even after Shamir agreed to take part in the talks, he insisted that Baker travel to Israel to get the word. That was another example of what some diplomats see as the one-upmanship that the two men have been engaging in since the Bush Administration began reviving the peace process in March. Upon arriving in Jerusalem, the Secretary spent 90 minutes huddled with Shamir before they announced at a joint press conference that Arab-Israeli talks would indeed convene. Peace in the Middle East, said Baker, was "no longer simply a dream."
In a considerable understatement, Baker added that there was "some work" to be done to secure the cooperation of the Palestinians, who still insist that they will choose their own delegation without interference and that a representative of East Jerusalem must be included. With all the major Arab states, plus the Soviet Union and other European nations, ready to talk peace, the Palestinians may have no choice but to acquiesce to Shamir's formulation. Jordan's King Hussein has appealed to the P.L.O. not to raise problems over Palestinian representation. And Egyptian Foreign Minister Amre Moussa is seeking a possible compromise: Arab residents of East Jerusalem would be excluded from the first round of negotiations but included at a later stage.
For Shamir, the agreement to attend the conference required only a slight shift in emphasis: he simply said yes, Israel would sit down at the peace parley provided the Palestinian delegation was acceptable, rather than no, it would not attend if the Palestinian group was not acceptable. Beyond that, the stone-faced Prime Minister gave away little. At meetings with his right-wing supporters, Shamir emphasized that he had not agreed to sacrifice -- or even discuss -- the status of Jerusalem and that there was no requirement for Israel to halt construction of new settlements in the territories or lift the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israeli troops. "Trust me," Shamir told a gathering of Knesset members from the small rightist parties that hold his ruling Likud coalition together. "We won't withdraw one millimeter."
U.S., Soviet and other organizers of the peace conference hope the negotiating process may serve to soften Shamir's intransigence. Their strategy is to coax the old enemies toward agreement on less contentious issues in the hope that the result will be a climate of trust that enables progress on more explosive issues. "You want to give this process time so that thinking can evolve," says a senior Administration official. "Different kinds of compromises become possible over time because people see things in different ways."