Dialogue of the Deaf

"We will offer territorial compromise. Will King Hussein and the Palestinians have the courage to do the same?" This, in effect, is the distinction that Israel's Labor Party is making between its own policy towards the West Bank and that of the governing Likud coalition, which wants to keep it all. To the unpracticed ear, the Labor policy has a nice ring to it. Who could rightfully complain at the offer of a territorial compromise?

In fact, however, what is going on is a dialogue of the deaf. When the Arabs and the Israeli Labor Party talk of "territorial compromise," they are talking of two quite different things. Difficult as it may be for most Americans to comprehend, the Arabs thought they had already made a territorial compromise when they agreed, through their acceptance of 1967's U.N. Resolution 242, to recognize Israel's pre-1967 borders. After all, hadn't they been refusing, ever since 1948, to accept the existence of any Israeli state at all? And weren't they now agreeing to accept not only the original Israeli state established in accordance with the U.N. partition plan, but also all the additional conquests of Arab land that Israel had made during the fighting of 1948 and 1949? All the Arabs wanted, in return for this recognition, was the return of the land that Israel had captured in the 1967 war. This is the kind of a deal that was eventually made with Egypt. But neither Likud nor the Labor Party is ready to offer a similar one to Jordan and the Palestinians, no matter how many security measures are locked into it.

For the Labor Party, the words "territorial compromise" have nothing to do with the events prior to 1967. They do not take into account what the Arabs have already accepted in the way of previous Israeli conquests—as though the history of Israel began with the Six-Day War. The words signify no more than a willingness to return some of the West Bank, and do not even harmonize with the concept which was in the minds of the framers of 242 and their U.S. backers—that full Israeli withdrawal, with the exception of very minor border rectifications, should be traded for full peace. The Labor Party, however, wants to get its full peace in return for a much lower price. It seems as though if the Labor Party gets in, the Arabs will once again be offered not an equitable and durable settlement but an opportunity to surrender.