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The meetings will begin with a plenary session at which the U.S. and the Soviet Union will be co-hosts. The site has not been decided, but Washington, Geneva and Cairo have been mentioned as possibilities. Present will be Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. The European Community will participate, and the Gulf Cooperation Council, representing Saudi Arabia and other gulf states, will send an observer, as will the United Nations.
After two days of opening ceremonies, the talks will break up into bilateral groups: Israeli-Syrian talks on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights; Israeli- Jordanian-Palestinian discussions on the future of the West Bank and Gaza; Israeli-Lebanese negotiations over Israel's "security zone" along their common border. Simultaneously, multilateral working groups will tackle less contentious regional problems such as water, the environment and arms control.
Given the extraordinary lineup of forces favoring the conference, it is likely that the remaining roadblocks to the talks will be knocked down. Whether the negotiators will be able to find any common ground once they sit down together is another matter. "Don't be surprised if the photo opportunity passes, and then the bilateral negotiations bog down very quickly," warns William Quandt, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution.
Gorbachev's and Bush's tag-team diplomacy on the Middle East was just one consequence of what the Soviet leader described as a warm "feeling of solidarity" that has developed between the two men. Bush responded to Gorbachev's many compliments by toasting him as "a man I respect and admire" and by promising to seek most-favored-nation trading status for the Soviet Union. He even chided reporters for blaming the Soviet government "before you know what happened" in last week's killing of seven guards at a Lithuanian customs house
Gorbachev suggested that with START out of the way the superpowers were in a position to tackle other sources of international tension, like Yugoslavia and Central America. Certainly the agreement to hold talks in the Middle East was proof of the promise that East-West collaboration holds out to the world. Until Bush and Gorbachev teamed up, the two sides had so little to say to each other that they could not even agree to talk.