Miracles From Carrots and Sticks

If appearance is reality, King Hussein of Jordan's League of Arab States' summit meeting in November was the best thing that's happened in the Middle East since the autumn of 1982. That year, shocked by the Israeli devastation of Lebanon and dispersion of the Palestinians based there, the Arab League heads of state met in Fez, Morocco, and unanimously adopted Saudi Arabian Crown Prince (now King) Fahd's principles for Middle East peace as their own Fez plan. That Arab peace plan embodied UN Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula, and called for self-determination for the Palestinians in a state of their own. The reason those good things happened at the 1982 meeting is that Libya and Syria stayed home.

Unfortunately, Libya and Syria haven't made that mistake again, and the Arabs, who generally reach a position by consensus rather than by majority vote, have seemed paralyzed ever since. In Amman, however, threatened with the possibility of an Iranian victory in the Gulf war, the League of Arab States awoke from its five-year slumber. It called for an international conference on Arab-Israeli peace. It took a unified position urging Iran to accept the UN call for a cease-fire already accepted by Iraq. And while it did not formally welcome Egypt back into the Arab League, it opened the way for league members to re-establish diplomatic relations with Egypt. This all happened because the delegates ignored the negativism of the Libyan delegation, and apparently brought Syria most of the way around to an Arab consensus view.

It probably was no coincidence that Saudi Arabia was represented at the meeting by Crown Prince Abdullah, whose penetrating gaze denotes a certain tenacity of purpose. That tenacity may have worked in Syria's favor in the past. The crown prince was said to support continuation of generous Saudi subsidies to President Hafez Al-Assad's forces confronting Israel, despite Assad's tendency to kick the props out from under whatever peacemaking platforms the Saudis and their allies have sought to erect. Assad's sudden association with the Arab summit position on the Gulf war may be the result of an even larger Saudi carrot. It's reasonable to assume, however, that the presence of the Saudi crown prince in Amman was also an implied stick. If the Syrians didn't associate themselves with agreed Arab positions, he might recommend that Saudi Arabia withhold any subsidies to Syria.

In these pages, Saudi Arabia has been criticized for past reluctance to give uncooperative Assad a shove toward the peace table. Now, we suggest that Congress and the Reagan administration stop complaining and consider following the Saudi example of how to handle a prickly client state. The Arabs, the Europeans, the USSR, the US, and Israel's foreign minister are all on record in favor of an international peace conference to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian and the Israeli-Syrian disputes. But there isn't going to be one just because Israel's intransigent Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir says there isn't. Isn't it time Uncle Sam turned our $3 billion annual carrot to Israel into a stick by threatening to withhold it from an Israeli prime minister who daily thumbs his nose at the world in general and the US in particular?

That technique just worked a miracle in Amman. It might work a miracle in Jerusalem.

—Richard Curtiss