The U.S. and Self-Determination

Question: Would President Reagan's Middle East peace efforts be in any more trouble than they are already, if his proposals of last September had held out the prospect of self-determination for the Palestinians?

To us, the answer is clear: certainly not. But we would also like to go further, in suggesting that if such a prospect had been a part of the President's proposals, his peace efforts would be in better shape than they are in today.

We remain incredulous when we hear people, some of them in the upper reaches of the government, argue that any allusion to an independent Palestinian state would have made the President's proposals unacceptable to the Israelis. Where have they been? From the very first day, the current Reagan plan was angrily rejected by the Israeli government, which proceeded to do everything it could think of to scuttle it. If he had allowed for self-determination, the President's plan could not have met any worse a fate. How could the Israelis have hanged the sheep any more definitively than they hanged the lamb?

On the other hand, there is little doubt in the minds of those who are familiar with the PLO's thinking that a Reagan plan which contained within it the opportunity for a Palestinian state would have fundamentally altered the PLO's approach to the plan, and almost certainly would have resulted in a positive outcome for the Hussein-Arafat negotiations and the establishment of a negotiating team. This is what the Administration says it was trying to achieve.

We are not suggesting that the President should have proposed self-determination only in order to gain favor with one of the parties. We are suggesting it because we think there will never be a permanent peace in the area until the Palestinians have gained what the Israelis already have—an independent homeland in Palestine. And without Middle East peace, U.S. security will continually be at risk, as the danger of a U.S.-Soviet confrontation emanating from Arab-Israeli conflict stretches ahead endlessly.

Nor are we suggesting that the U.S. propose a plan that would either be unjust or in conflict with the traditions and precedents of U.S. history. Since Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. has been associated with the principle of self-determination. And in 1947, the U.S. voted at the United Nations in favor of giving an independent homeland to the Arabs as well as to the Jews.

Recently, President Reagan asked the PLO to make a "bold and courageous move" to break the deadlock of negotiations. We think the PLO would have been willing to do this if Mr. Reagan had made a bold and courageous move of his own last September, by publicly recognizing the Palestinians' sense of national identity and their right to have a homeland to match it. But it is not yet too late for him to do this. In view of the well-known domestic political constraints, it would certainly take a lot of political courage on his part to recommend the creation of a Palestinian state, and would probably take even more to announce that the U.S. will no longer subsidize Israel's economy and armed forces as long as that country persists in carrying out policies which conflict with the U.S.'s own. But we think it is essential for these steps to be taken if the U.S. national interest is to be preserved.