Unprofitable times for peacemakers

Press, 26 February 1983, Page 14

Unprofitable times for peacemakers

From ‘The Economist,’ London

These seem unprofitable days for the Middle East's putative peacemakers. The Palestine Liberation Organisation’s appointed parliament has been celebrating in Algiers the P.L.O.'s return to the centre of the political stage; its public words have not suggested that the parliamentarians were doing much to let peace emerge. The Israeli Government, for its part, has obeyed the letter of the Kahan commission's recommendations by removing Mr Ariel Sharon from the Defence Ministry, but has defied the commissions spirit by leaving Mr Sharon to roam angrily at large inside the Cabinet. The outlook for the peace plan that President Reagan put forward last September is not exactly brilliant. If it were just another plan, the time might

be approaching to,abandon it to the timeless wastes ol Middle East non-negotiation. But it is not just another plan. The importance of the Reagan proposal — for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaze in association with Jordan — is that, for the first time, an American President put his weight behind an idea for solving the Palestine question as distinct from the Arab-Israeli one. Jordan’s King Hussein is said to have been assured by Mr Reagan that, so long as the central thesis of JordanianPalestinian "association'’ is adhered to. the President is prepared to work seriously for the implementation of his own proposal. The question now is whether enough of the central thesis can be salvaged from the P.L.O.’s meeting to enable King Hussein to call on the Ameri-

can President to make good his commitment. The parliament may have half-conceded the confederal principle (while still talking of independence), but is jibbing at being asked to delegate P.L.O. responsibility to King Hussein and non-P.L.O. Palestinians. It had been hoped, before the meeting, that the P.L.O. would show a modicum of decisiveness; by the time the meeting began bn February 14. indecision seemed the preferred course. Between now and the end of February. King Hussein will have to decide whether this is good enough. The King has set March 1 as his deadline for delivering some kind of Jordanian-Pales-tinian package to President Reagan and thus inaugurating the second stage in the process. Deadlines can usually be post-

poned but not. in this instance, by very much. It is accepted wisdom that no American presidential candidate can combine electioneering with taking on Israel. The pro-Israeli lobby in the United States may believe that if the West Bank issue can be kept out of the way for the next few months, with American attention diverted if need be to Israeli concessions in Lebanon, the Reagan proposals will be safely banished at least until after the November. 1984. election. No candidate in his right mind would confront Israel and its lobby in the middle of a campaign. Yet Mr Reagan's calculations could be slightly different. He has already challenged Israel’s occupation and colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza, and has been unambiguously defied by Mr Menachem Begin, Israel’s Prime Minister, on both counts. No publicity wizard could transform that into a foreign policy success. If the Reagan initiative disappears into the sands of the campaign, it will be damningly dismissed as well-intentioned but feeble. It is thus in Mr Reagan's own interests, as well as in the wider interest of the region's stability, for him to take some unfeeble steps rather soon. No step is possible if King Hussein arrives in Washington with nobody to negotiate for, and nothing to negotiate about. If he arrives with Palestinians in his team, and empowered to talk about confederation, the focus swings back to Israel. That country’s economic and diplomatic dependence on the United States makes American action pos-

sible; it does not make it simple. The target is to convince Mr Begin privately that stalemate in Lebanon and over the West Bank, beyond a certain date, will carry the risk of a withholding of American material support; and to convince enough Israelis that holding on to the West Bank is not worth this erosion of American goodwill. The danger is that ill-judged pressure could drive Israelis to club together against the pressure from outside. Israels Masada complex is alive and clamorous, though exaggerated

by Mr Begins supporters in their efforts to avert any pressure at all from being applied The timing, as Mr Reagan's advisers recognise, is all. Much depends on King Hussein's calculations, and Mr Arafat's footwork, over the next few weeks. The Palestinians have muffed the business of giving him a strong mandate. If he makes the best of what is allowed him. a lot of people — Israelis. Syrians, dissenting Palestinians — will jeer that the emperor has no clothes. If the monarch's courage is rewarded with genuine American support, the Palestinian clothes may follow.