U.S. Is Losing Patience With Israel Vote Plan : Frustrated Bush Administration May Consider Dropping Shamir Outline for Arab-Backed One

MUSCAT, Oman —  The Bush Administration, frustrated by new “deal-breaker” restrictions on Israel’s Palestinian election proposal, may consider abandoning the Israeli initiative in favor of an Arab-backed plan for an international peace conference, according to a senior State Department official.

For the time being, the official told reporters aboard Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s aircraft that arrived early Saturday in this Persian Gulf sultanate, the Administration will continue to base its Middle East diplomacy on Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s plan for elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But, the official said, Washington’s patience is running out.

Prospects for Conference

“If things totally bog down, if you can’t make progress with this election’s proposal, then we would have to look a little bit more closely at the prospect of an international conference,” the official, a top policy maker, said. “There’s an awful lot of support (for a conference) out there from other countries.”

Just a week or so ago, Administration officials were prepared to wait for months, if necessary, for Shamir’s election initiative to bear fruit. They said privately that they would be satisfied if preliminary talks about the details of the balloting began before the end of this year, with the actual election even farther into the future.

But that was before Shamir agreed to new conditions demanded by the right wing of his own Likud Party. Although the restrictions were not very different from Shamir’s own long-held position, the impact of the action at this time on the peace process was devastating.

“These are the kind of things that fall under the heading of ‘deal-breakers,’ ” said the official, who spoke on the understanding he would not be named.

The official quickly added that Israel’s Arab adversaries have taken a similarly hard-line stance that also makes progress toward compromise far less likely. Moreover, the terrorist attack on a Tel Aviv-to-Jerusalem bus last week is certain to harden positions on both sides.

Speaking of Shamir’s new conditions the official said, “This is the equivalent of the Arabs saying, ‘Before we’ll talk about elections, we want the Israelis out of the occupied territories. . . .’ We had requested both sides to refrain from doing that. Both sides have done it.”

Despite the official’s even-handed distribution of blame to Israelis and Arabs for the current stalemate, the Arabs stand to gain at Israel’s expense from Washington’s growing impatience.

Virtually all Arab parties, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, advocate an international conference, to be attended by the parties to the dispute plus the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, to hammer out a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shamir is firmly opposed to such a conference, arguing the other participants would gang up on Israel and pressure it to yield at least some of the territory it seized during the 1967 Middle East War.

U.S. Cool to the Idea

The United States has been cool to the international conference idea, although former Secretary of State George P. Shultz reluctantly embraced it as part of his abortive Middle East peace initiative last year.

The Bush Administration maintains that a “properly structured conference at the right time” might advance the cause of peace, but the President made the Shamir plan the cornerstone of his Middle East diplomacy from the moment the Israeli prime minister unveiled it during a visit to Washington earlier this year.

The United States has argued that the Shamir plan is the most promising initiative currently available and, therefore, should be given every opportunity to succeed. Baker and other Administration officials have tried, without much success, to persuade the Soviet Union, Western European countries, the PLO and such moderate states as Egypt and Jordan to give the Shamir plan a chance.

Odds Getting Longer

The senior official said that Washington will not change that course for the time being. But he conceded that the odds against it have lengthened considerably.

“We will continue to try work with the (Shamir) proposal because we always thought it offered us the possibility of getting the parties into negotiations,” the official said. “But it will depend on whether progress can be made. There’s no doubt that this makes it harder to make progress.

“If we get stalemated and we can’t make progress, then maybe we have to say, OK, we tried the elections proposal and it didn’t work, and we’ll look for other formulas,” he said. “But we’re not at that point.”

The official’s comments went far beyond the Administration’s guarded public reactions to Shamir’s speech to a Likud Party meeting last week. For the record, officials are insisting that the action represents only a party position, not a change in policy by the Israeli government, a coalition in which Likud is joined by several junior partners, including the more liberal Labor Party.

Actions of Party Only

Baker told a press conference in Brunei on Friday that the new restrictions were “the actions of a political party; they were not the actions of a government.” Baker said only that the Likud resolution was “not helpful.”

But the official who spoke to reporters during Baker’s flight from Brunei to Oman left little doubt that Washington believes the damage is far more extensive than it cares to admit in public.

Baker discussed the Middle East situation Saturday with the defense and foreign ministers of Oman, a tiny but strategically located sultanate that controls the south side of the Strait of Hormuz, the choke-point at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. However, Baker’s stop in Oman was primarily to give him a brief rest between the meeting of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations that ended Friday in Brunei and the start today of President Bush’s European trip. Baker is scheduled to join the President in Warsaw tonight.