It's Still Time for Mideast Peace

By Richard Curtiss

Washington's journalistic sages assure us that events in October derailed the Middle East peace process. We think not. Each event that forces Americans to focus on the Middle East hastens the day when some U.S. President will start acting like the leader of a great power by implementing an American Middle East policy made in the U.S.A. rather than in Israel, as suggested on the facing page.

October's disasters had three causes. In Israel, Shimon Peres changed his mind. In Tunis, Yassir Arafat apparently tried to straddle horses going in two different directions. And in Washington our President forgot he is no longer an actor who can wait for others to provide the script he should be writing himself.

Shimon Peres has only a year left as Prime Minister of Israel before he stepsdown in favor of his hard-line coalition partner, Yitzhak Shamir. A few months ago it appears Peres decided that, if King Hussein and Arafat were really willing to negotiate peace jointly, he would agree to meet their joint delegation. Polls showed that half of the Israelis would return Arab lands for real peace. The other half, who support Shamir's Likud block, want to keep it all. Their goal is to bring down King Hussein's government, declare Jordan "the real Palestine," and force into it Palestinian Arabs presently living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

Peres reasoned that, if he agreed to talk with King Hussein, Shamir's Likud would withdraw its support and the current Israeli coalition government would fall. In the ensuing elections the Likudists would be torn apart by a leadership struggle between Shamir and Ariel Sharon. The Labor Coalition headed by Peres might, therefore, win a clear election victory.

While Hussein and Arafat were still pursuing their cautious courtship of each other and of the U.S., however, Peres made a costly political blunder. He traded 1150 Palestinian prisoners for three Israelis held by hard-line, rejectionist Palestinian rivals of Arafat. The trade made Peres appear either soft-headed or soft-hearted.

So how could Peres repair the damage? Israeli intelligence told him some members of the PLO executive committee, two of whom were shortly to talk with top British leaders, were scheduled to meet in Tunis with Yassir Arafat, who was later to travel to New York to address the United Nations. Peres dispatched eight warplanes to Tunis to dispatch Arafat, and as much of the PLO leadership as they could bury with him, in the PLO headquarters while the meeting was underway. The luck that has saved Arafat from a whole series of assassination attempts, about half by Arab rejectionists and the other half by Israel, saved him again. The committee meeting had been postponed.

One can be endowed generously with luck and sparingly with understanding of how to use the media, however. With the world's television cameras zooming in, a shaken Arafat accused the U.S. of participating in the bombing, an activity in which the Israelis need no assistance, when he should have been asking American television viewers why, with the U.S. Sixth Fleet stationed off Tunisia to protect it from Libyan air attacks, we were unable to provide our Tunisian ally any warning about the incoming Israeli attackers. He might have reminded Americans that he is headquartered in Tunis because, in 1982, President Reagan asked Tunisian President Bourguiba to take him in and save Beirut from more Israeli bombing. He might also have suggested that the Israeli raid, in which some 50 innocent Tunisians are said to have died, followed a pattern of Israeli actions over many years designed to drive wedges between the U.S. and all of its moderate Arab friends.

Arafat had other problems, however. While gingerly talking peace and prohibiting violence by his followers on the international scene, he apparently has acquiesced in letting Palestinians keep the heat on the Israelis inside their borders through what Palestinians call "armed struggle" and Israelis call terrorism. The four shipjackers, allegedly from one of seven Palestinian groups loosely allied with Arafat's Al Fatah within the PLO, were apparently planning to carry out one of those actions when they seized the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and killed Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly American tourist. That they expected a warm welcome in Syria, whose President is Arafat's mortal enemy, indicates strongly that there was no connection to Arafat at all.

Once again, however, television cameras zoomed in on Arafat in Tunis and his top aides in Cairo and New York. They might have invited journalists to compare the gravity of a state-organized assassination mission by eight U.S.-furnished Israeli jets with a shipjacking by four hoodlums in their 20s who apparently still can't agree upon what they were supposed to do or where they were to do it. Instead, one of the two PLO Executive Committee members arrived in London apparently unaware that his signature on a statement endorsing a land-for-peace formula was a condition of the invitation. The gist had been cleared with the PLO in advance, but the British had made some language changes. The PLO official refused to sign, and thus created another PLO public relations disaster. No visit with the British Government. No follow-up visit with the EEC. No Arafat invitation to the UN birthday party in New York.

It was such a political windfall for Shimon Peres that he seems to have gone back to a brilliant variation of his original idea, saying he would meet with Hussein under the international auspices Hussein prefers. If it is a sincere offer, Likud will bring down the Israeli government. Or he may be trying to tempt Hussein to ditch Arafat, which would bring down Hussein's own government. Peres would then, through honeyed words, have accomplished what Shamir and Sharon expect to do with planes and tanks. Hussein won't bite, but a lot of U.S. Congressmen did. In insisting now that Hussein must talk with Israelis on their own terms before he receives U.S. military aid, they are, knowingly or unknowingly, demanding that Hussein help destroy his own regime. Why, if that kind of U.S. economic pressure on friends is now acceptable, don't we apply it to Israel and solve the whole Middle East impasse in minutes?

One Palestinian-American poet, Alex Odeh, tried to explain some of this to California television viewers and was killed by a parcel bomb. His murder was just as cowardly as that of Leon Klinghoffer. There will be other U.S. victims if Middle East peace remains stuck between the rock of the Palestinians' demand for some of their land back, and the hard place of the Israelis wanting to keep it all. There need not be, however, if President Reagan will stop acting like an actor, and start acting like a President.

—R.C.