French Official Pushes Talks in Syria and Israel

JERUSALEM — French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, concluding a quick swing through the Middle East, declared here Sunday that a Syrian-Israeli summit meeting would help push the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations ahead, but he coyly refused to say whether he was trying to arrange one.

“I never said I had such a mission,” Dumas said of widespread rumors that his visits to Damascus, Cairo and Jerusalem were intended to arrange a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Syrian President Hafez Assad. “But as it has appeared in the papers, it is interesting to launch the idea, for it is a good one, and from that we have to discuss it.”

And with a smile and a shrug that were even more enigmatic than his comments, Dumas then went off to dinner with Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, who himself has tried to open a confidential “French channel” between Israel and its Arab neighbors to operate in parallel with U.S.-sponsored peace talks.

Although a senior Rabin aide insisted Sunday that “nothing is hidden here,” the impression persisted that such an experienced and high-profile diplomat as Dumas would not devote an autumn weekend to grueling Mideast consultations, his second round of top-level meetings in a month, without a promise of progress.

Meeting first with Rabin and then with Peres, Dumas at the very least was conveying the essence of his four hours of talks Saturday with Assad in Damascus and the further discussions he had Sunday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo.

The Dumas trip came amid reports in two British magazines specializing in the Middle East that Israel and Syria had, in fact, already agreed on a basic formula for the return to Syria of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War.

According to the unconfirmed reports, Israel would acknowledge Syrian sovereignty over the whole Golan Heights and immediately return 60% of the region to Syrian control. About 20% would serve as a buffer zone and would be manned by U.N. or other international forces. The final 20%, including most of Israel’s 32 settlements, would be leased back by Israel for as long as a century.