UNITED NATIONS — As the Security Council conducted its monthly Middle East debate yesterday, Israeli, Palestinian Arab, and American officials laid the groundwork for a fall season some predict will be the most intensive diplomatic time since the final year of President Clinton’s administration.

As some diplomats raised hopes that summit meetings at the United Nations in September and in Washington later in the fall would help ease the age-old Israeli-Arab dispute, others saw peril in a rush toward a solution on core issues driven mostly by the political needs of unpopular leaders in Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Washington.

One of the declared diplomatic goals is to promote the reported new Arab readiness to end the conflict with Israel. Next month, Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, and other Arab leaders will meet with America and its allies at the United Nations to discuss how to nurture the so-called Arab plan for peace — even though no Israelis or Palestinian Arabs will participate.

The diplomatic frenzy surrounding the efforts seems momentous, both to its supporters and those who fear it.

“Like Elvis Presley said, ‘It’s now or never,'” the head of the U.N.-affiliated International Peace Academy, Terje Roed-Larsen, told The New York Sun, speaking from his homeland in Norway yesterday. As fears of a Middle Eastern clash between “Persian nationalism and Arab nationalism” overshadow the differences Sunni Arabs have with Israel, and with a weak Washington administration in search of a legacy, the situation is ripe for successful diplomacy, he said.

If bilateral preparations are insufficient, a failure could lead to disaster, he warned. Noting “certain similarities” to Mr. Clinton’s diplomacy, which led to the violence and terrorism of the so-called Second Intifada, Mr. Roed-Larsen, a veteran of Middle Eastern diplomacy, said he worries that “we can end up in the same situation — which is why it has to succeed this time.”

In Jerusalem, some politicians fear that, beyond additional violence, hasty concessions could shackle Israeli leaders in decades to come.
Even if the diplomatic ideas discussed in the planned meetings of President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Prime Minister Olmert are “no more than terms of reference, past experience teaches us that such terms become the basis for future negotiations,” the opposition Likud Party’s foreign policy point man, Zalman Shoval, said. “In the future, Israel would never again be able to say, ‘Sorry, we didn’t mean it.'”

Mr. Shoval also charged that Mr. Olmert was not coordinating enough with Washington, and that other players, most notably Saudi Arabia, were more in tune with American diplomacy.

This fall’s diplomacy surge will open with a September 23 meeting of the Quartet — America, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations — on the Middle East, followed by an iftar dinner, the traditional meal eaten at the end of a Ramadan fasting day. Joining the Quartet members at the dinner, meant to promote the “Arab plan” for peace, a Saudi initiative only sketchily outlined to date, will be officials from key Arab countries — but not Israel or Palestinian Arabs.

“No peace summit could take place without Syria,” Damascus’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar al-Jaafari, told the Sun yesterday. However, Syria will not meet with Israeli officials and it is unclear whether — despite fears of Iran — Saudi officials are ready to share a dinner with their Israeli counterparts either.

Never very trusting of the Quartet or the United Nations, Jerusalem would prefer that regional capitals or Washington became the arena for a groundbreaking public meeting with countries like Saudi Arabia. “We weren’t invited to the U.N. dinner, and we didn’t push too hard to get an invitation,” said a Jerusalem official, who asked for anonymity.

The main event of the fall is expected to be a Washington summit, tentatively scheduled for November, at which Israel and Palestinian Arabs are expected to discuss some of the most prevalent issues between them. But the details of that American-led summit are yet to be decided, and largely depend on the bilateral diplomacy conducted now in the region.

“If we go to a conference without clarity on a solution and without a declaration of principles,” Mr. Abbas said in Amman, Jordan, yesterday, “I don’t think that the conference will be beneficial,” according to the Associated Press.

While Messrs. Abbas and Olmert “struck up a very strong personal rapport” in their string of recent meetings, the U.N. special Middle East coordinator, Michael Williams, said, he agreed that the groundwork is not yet ready. Nevertheless, he added, “it is only August 29 today, and the tentative date I see for the summit is mid-November.”

“There are still gaps” between the two sides, Mr. Williams said. The Palestinian Arabs want to see “a more ambitious agreement, a sort of a framework agreement, which the Israelis are more reluctant to go for at this stage.” Nevertheless, he said, there was enough time and enough will on both sides to “make real movement” toward a successful summit.