It's make-or-break time at Camp David

As President Clinton returns, U.S. officials suggested progress must be made today for the talks to continue.

©New York Times, published July 24, 2000

THURMONT, Md. -- With stakes mounting as the Camp David summit nears its third week, President Clinton returned Sunday for negotiations expected to run late into the night and American officials suggested that the talks, now centered on the future of Jerusalem, could break apart in the next day or solidify into a deal.

Adding a new aura of gravity to the discussion over Jerusalem, the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, traveled to Saudi Arabia to ensure Saudi support for the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, as he weighs a U.S. proposal on the holy city.

The diplomacy by Mubarak, who enjoys the best relations with Arafat of any Arab leader, was seen by the Israelis and the Americans as an effort to fashion a wall of Arab solidarity behind the Palestinian leader.

The Americans made it plain through the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, that the summit would not go on indefinitely and could reach a make-or-break point as soon as today.

"We are not here for an unlimited period of time," Boucher said. The president would be given an immediate assessment and this would be "very important" in how the talks moved, he said.

Privately, American officials suggested that if progress was not made by today, it would be difficult to keep going. If the talks moved toward midweek, they added, that would be a sign that things were going well.

At his summer palace outside Rome, Pope John Paul II entered the Camp David debate, exhorting the summit leaders in his weekly Sunday address to adopt a long-held Vatican position that a special international status be extended to the holy sites in the old city of Jerusalem.

As important figures on the outside tried to nudge the conference toward an agreement, Clinton left behind the relative calm of an uncontentious economic summit in Japan, and entered what appeared to be, from several accounts, a razor-edge atmosphere among the Israelis and Palestinians at Camp David.

To relieve the tensions, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, visited the Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg Sunday with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Arafat relaxed at Albright's Virginia farm where she served him lunch Saturday.

Sunday was the conference's 13th day, the duration of the first Middle East peace conference at Camp David under the auspices of President Carter in 1978.

The Israelis have been publicly stating over the last few days that Barak was willing to make concessions on Jerusalem, though it was far from clear that they would be enough for Arafat. Gadi Baltiansky, Barak's spokesman, suggested the Israelis believed the summit had entered its critical phase.

"It won't take a lot of time," Baltiansky said. "President Clinton will return to Camp David and then we will see if there is any point in staying here, and going on with the talks, or to pack the luggage and go home."

In Clinton's absence, the stakes grew in a variety of ways.

In a letter he wrote to Clinton before the summit was pronounced dead and then swiftly revived last Wednesday night, Barak stated, according to leaks in the Israeli press, that if the summit ended with no overall accord, he would walk away from even those points to which he had agreed.

The Americans have suggested that they may be facing an all-or-nothing outcome and a situation at the very end in which Clinton will be trying to rescue partial progress from the rubble of a blow up over Jerusalem.

One way of looking at the negotiations as they unfold in the next day or so, according to this scenario, is as a rock being pushed up a hill. If a full agreement formally bringing an end to the 52-year conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is not achieved, then the progress on some of the less explosive issues, like the territorial shape of a new Palestinian state and the fate of Palestinian refugees, could be wiped out as the rock rolled back down the slope.

The principle of the American compromise appears to be virtually full sovereignty for the Palestinians over Palestinian villages in East Jerusalem and what one analyst called a "sense of sovereignty" over the Muslim religious sites in the center of Old Jerusalem.

Mubarak's visit to King Fahd in Saudi Arabia also raised the stakes because the Saudi royal family are the protectors of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest Islamic sites, and have a huge interest in the Islamic site in East Jerusalem. On Saturday, the Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers met to discuss the Camp David negotiations.

As Arafat considered what to do about East Jerusalem, he got pressure from another quarter Sunday. The leader of the militant Hamas movement, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, said in Gaza that he would be willing to declare a truce with Israel only if Israel agreed to withdraw completely to the 1967 borders from the West Bank, Gaza strip and East Jerusalem.

The pope's appeal was based on a longstanding view of the Roman Catholic church that the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem and its annexation to Israel was an act of occupation. In February, the Vatican signed an accord with the Palestinians calling for freedom of worship in all the holy sites of East Jerusalem.



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