Detours on the Road to Peace

We have been saying ever since President Reagan's re-election that 1985 is the year when a real Middle East peace, based on U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 and acceptable to moderates in both the Arab and Israeli camps, can be set in motion.

Each time such possibilities have existed before, however, the momentum has been dissipated on problems other than the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, which underlies them all. For example, there was the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, upon which the Reagan Administration wasted half of its entire first term. When Secretary of State Shultz couldn't broker an agreement giving the Israelis permanent rights in Lebanon, they withdrew anyway because their position there was untenable.

Since intransigents on either side could make this the last such opportunity for peace in many years, it's important that we no longer fritter away weeks or months on side issues. An example is the long imbroglio over when and under what conditions the U.S. will speak to the PLO. A decade ago, Henry Kissinger told the Israelis the U.S. would not deal with the PLO until after the PLO had accepted Resolution 242, which calls for Israeli withdrawal from Arab lands seized in 1967 in return for Arab acknowledgement of Israel's "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries."

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat dug in against such acceptance in hopes of holding the extremist Palestinian elements within his fragile coalition. The U.S. then began devising extraordinary strategies to deal with responsible Palestinians. The Palestinian wildmen have meanwhile moved out of Arafat's coalition into a Syrian-organized anti-Arafat front and, after watching the Syrian-orchestrated subjugation of Beirut refugee camps, may be having some quiet second thoughts. Meanwhile, however, Arafat no longer has to please them and, in his negotiations with King Hussein, has made the key concessions. Hussein is saying, however, that Arafat needs public assurance that the U.S. supports "self-determination" for the Palestinians within a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation before Arafat will announce his own support of 242. Presumably all of this will happen shortly, and the U.S. can come off its own position that it will talk to a mixed Jordanian-Palestinian delegation but not if the Palestinians are "members" of the PLO. To save going through the same process a second time when we want the Israelis to negotiate a peace treaty with Palestinians, let's examine the position the U.S. took, and that Israel still is taking.

It makes about as much sense as it would if the Russians said they were willing to negotiate peace and disarmament with a delegation from the Western nations so long as the American, included did not support the U.S. Government. Since virtually all Americans do profess loyalty to the U.S. Government, the Russians wouldn't find any Americans to speak to except hermits or traitors.

The Israelis are setting up the same barrier to discussions with responsible Palestinians. The PLO is their government, the only one they've had in this century, and the Palestine National Council is their parliament. They may be conservative West Bank land owners, middle class supporters of Yasser Arafat living in Amman, Kuwait, or even the U.S., bomb throwers recruited by George Habash from the refugee camps, or Syria's rented Palestinian gunslingers, but virtually all consider themselves loyal to the not with the PLO, but with each other over who should head it. Similarly, Americans don't argue about the necessity for a United States government, but over who should be its elected officials and what laws they should pass.

We're therefore making it hard for a moderate Palestinian like Arafat, with whom peace could be negotiated, to get to the peace table against the wishes of his Marxist and Syrian-oriented Palestinian rivals within the PLO.

The problem is no longer simply one of Israelis Versus Arabs, but rather one of moderates against intransigents and ideologues in both camps. For instance, there is Colonel Qaddafl. An Arab-Israeli war every decade isn't enough to satisfy him. He uses oil money to subsidize religious and political strife anywhere he finds it.

And there is George Habash, Marxist leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, formerly a component of Arafat's PLO and now supporting the Syrian anti-Arafat coalition. Habash wanted to turn the Palestinian tragedy into a catalyst for Marxist revolution across the entire Middle East. He used young Palestinians to terrorize airline passengers all over the globe. In doing so he destroyed popular sympathy for the Palestinian refugees for at least a generation.

Looking across the border into Israel we find Habash's American-born mirror image in "Rabbi" Meir Kahane. In the 70s his followers broke up pro-Palestinian meetings on American university campuses with bicycle chains. Then they moved to Israel and elected Kahane to the Knesset. Now, as West Bank Jewish "settlers," they are seeking to kill or maim enough West Bank Palestinians to produce a second and final exodus that will open the remainder of Palestine to Israel.

All the war lovers in Israel aren't running around machine-gunning West Bank university students, however, Menachem Begin made no bones about claiming credit for the first exodus of Palestinian villagers fleeing massacre by his Jewish underground killers in 1948. While subsequently serving as Israel's Prime Minister he demonstrated chutzpah of the highest order by announcing to the world that he would never negotiate with "PLO terrorists." Yitzhak Shamir, whose terrorist Stern Gang went as far afield as Egypt to assassinate British officials even while Britain was fighting Hitler in World War II, and whose members subsequently assassinated U.N. Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte as well, is Israel's present foreign minister and follows this same hypocritical line. His rival for leadership of Israel's intransigent Likud bloc is Ariel Sharon who, first in Jordanian territory and later in Lebanon, turned slaughter of civilians into a major tool of Israeli military policy.

The whole business of Middle East peace is too serious to be left to the whims of amoral vote chasers in Congress, Israel's well-paid U.S. lobbyists who swarm wherever American taxpayer dollars may be found, war-loving primitives like Qaddafi and Sharon, or ideologues and fanatics like Habash and Kahane.

It's time to move things rapidly along to the point where the Israelis have to decide whether they are going to authorize Prime Minister Shimon Peres to sit down with the Palestinians and negotiate implementation of Resolution 242's land-for-peace solution, or follow Shamir and Sharon toward a new Jewish Masada.

If we work vigorously to support the moderates in both camps, we can end 40 years of degradation and death for the Palestinians, give the Israelis a real sense of security based on harmony with, rather than intimidation of, their neighbors, and remove the single most likely catalyst for World War III. In doing so we may also ensure that our children can participate in mankind's conquest of space, rather than in mankind's attempt to survive a nuclear winter.

—Richard Curtiss