At Least They're Still Talking

Hope builds as Sadat meets with Israelis

Officials in Cairo insisted that the trip was being extended merely for a little vacation in the Alps. Some vacation. Flying into Vienna for a brief visit that started with a weekend gathering of the Socialist International, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat met twice last week with Israeli Opposition Leader Shimon Peres; the talks had been arranged by their host, Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. After retiring to a 16th century resort hotel outside Salzburg, Sadat then conferred with U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who just happened to be vacationing nearby at his summer home on the Attersee. Abruptly canceling a day of sightseeing in Munich, Sadat later spent an afternoon with Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman and his counterpart from Cairo, Abdel Ghany Gamassy.

The flurry of activity was a prelude to a meeting this week in Britain of the Israeli and Egyptian Foreign Ministers, with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance serving as moderator. Although nothing conclusive was achieved, the talks in Austria showed that Sadat is still eager to keep his peace initiative alive.

Of his talks with the Egyptians, Weizman said only that "various ways and possibilities for achieving peace" had been discussed and that the three men would meet again soon in Alexandria. The conversations between Sadat and Peres were strictly exploratory, since the Labor Party leader is in no position to speak for the Israeli government. Nonetheless, Sa dat and Peres did agree that the Aswan formula, drawn up by President Carter and Sadat last January, would provide an acceptable framework for a peace agreement. Among other things, the formula calls for participation by the Palestinians in determining their own future.

Although Israeli Premier Menachem Begin voiced no objections to the Sadat-Peres meeting, other Israeli officials did not disguise their displeasure. With some justice, they believe that Sadat would much prefer to see Peres as Israel's Premier. Seeing him as a potential successor to Begin, Sadat--in this Israeli view--may be trying to hold off from re-entering serious negotiations with Begin and his Foreign Minister, Moshe Dayan.

There is no doubt that the Egyptians, and their moderate Arab allies, are growing increasingly skeptical about the possibility of a dialogue with Begin. As Saudi Arabia's King Khalid bluntly put it on a visit to Kuwait: "Begin does not want peace." The Saudi monarch was pressing his own view that the time has come to ignore Begin and concentrate on what he sees as the real danger to the Middle East: recent Soviet penetration along the Red Sea and in the Horn of Africa, which threatens to encircle the Arabian oilfields and block the Suez Canal.

In Washington, Carter Administration officials were pleased with the new round of contacts. "It would have been inconceivable a year ago," observed a State Department Middle East expert of Sadat's meeting with Peres, "yet now we accept such talks between Israel and Egypt with nonchalance." American officials also noted that both sides had favorable words about certain aspects of a four-point plan on the Middle East proposed by former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Austrian Chancellor Kreisky.

The Brandt-Kreisky proposal calls for some Israeli withdrawal from each section of the occupied territories (Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza), with the exact location of peace boundaries to be determined in negotiations. Other points: demilitarization where necessary in the territories to be surrendered, Israel's right to unspecified security measures, and the right of Palestinians to participate in negotiations that would determine their political future.

The painstaking task of bringing Egypt and Israel back to the bargaining table could be ruined if renewed fighting in Lebanon sparked another confrontation between Syria and Israel. A tenuous truce brought a measure of calm to the country, where clashes two weeks ago between Syrian peace-keeping forces and Christian militiamen left 200 dead, most of them civilians. Both sides used the lull to bring heavy reinforcements into Beirut. Israel continued to supply military equipment to the rightist Christian armies of Pierre Gemayel and Camille Chamoun, who have been engaged in a bloodletting feud with forces loyal to former Lebanese President Suleiman Franjieh, also a Christian. Although most observers believed that the supplies would be the only Israeli help, Damascus nonetheless warned that any overt intervention by Israel could mean a new Arab-Israeli war.

Even as the armaments were being offloaded, thousands of Lebanese were fleeing the beleaguered capital, where Christian and Muslim sections were once again separated by an impassable no man's land. All plane seats out of the city were booked for the rest of the month. Other refugees fled up the mountain roads to small villages. "The mountains are the last safe place," said a carpenter as he filled his pickup truck with relatives and children. "It will not be possible to build a new life there, but we can stay alive. All we can do is hope for the best and expect the worst."

Diplomatic observers were not much more hopeful about the situation. "Even if the Syrians and the Christians patch something together," said a Western diplomat in Beirut, "it will hold for only a few weeks or a month. The state will fall back into conditions that produce more fighting. The guns talk here. Nothing else." President Elias Sarkis, who has been frustrated over his inability to prevent the fratricidal fighting, for a while threatened to resign. But he bowed to U.S. pressure to stay on in order to stave off what would almost certainly be, in his absence, total anarchy in the troubled land.

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