The Elusive Mideast Peace

Shocking, isn't it? But this is the same Abbas who started the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 with Yasser Arafat after writing a dissertation in which he denied the existence of the Holocaust. What was the PLO trying to liberate? Not the land of the West Bank and Gaza, which came under Israeli control only after the 1967 war. It wanted to "liberate" the Israel that ran to the Mediterranean. So where is the Abbas who will speak--in Arabic--of the legitimate sovereign right of the Jewish state to exist? Where is the Abbas who will prepare the ground for compromise?

The reality on the ground is as grim as the rhetoric. In the West Bank city of Nablus, Israelis found a broad-scope terrorist operation with an explosives laboratory and weapons. Then Fatah activists murdered two off-duty Israeli soldiers in the Hebron hills on a hike. The killers, who said they were celebrating Fatah's 43rd anniversary, were given refuge by the PA. It then put out a deliberately misleading statement to suggest the soldiers died as the result of an argument that deteriorated into a clash, instead of the coldblooded murders that they were.

We are further from peace than at the time of President Clinton's Camp David II in 2000. Indeed, compromise will have to overcome Palestinian objections to the retention of the large towns settled by tens of thousands of Israelis adjacent to and protective of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The United States now supports their inclusion in Israel's final boundaries. To be meaningful, this commitment necessarily involves more than being connected to Israel by untenable thin stalks of access roads through Palestinian territory. Nor should Jerusalem be turned into a crazy quilt of Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. Everyone knows that were Israel and the PA ever to cease cooperating fully, let alone regress to hostilities, Jerusalem and these new communities would be paralyzed and in mortal danger. U.N. Resolution 242, which ended the 1967 war, did not require Israel to withdraw from all the territories that it had occupied as the result of the war. But there is still no agreement on the percentage of lands that are to be annexed or swapped by Israel. Nor is there an agreement on Jerusalem or on the nature of Palestinian demilitarization or on the desire of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to relocate to Israel, which would undermine Israel as a Jewish state. In a word, there is fundamental disagreement on the premises that would underlie the establishment of two states for the Palestinians and for the Jewish people.

Worth supporting. Nevertheless, and in part because of the weakness of Abbas and of the PA and the risk that Abbas will be replaced by an even more radical Hamas, the ongoing talks deserve the support of America. The risk that must be accepted is that if the current negotiations fail, they will be seen by the Palestinian and the Israeli publics as evidence of the inability to solve this conflict by negotiation and compromise and will thus strengthen and embolden Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel. Expectations should be lowered, and negotiations should be held outside the public limelight, not with grandstanding but with a focus on measures that each side is capable of taking to make a difference.

Here are some practical suggestions:

• The Israelis evacuate settlers from all the unauthorized outposts. This is their obligation, and it must be fulfilled.
• Israel removes isolated settlements or relocates them with the encouragement of compensation and the prospect of more security.
• Israel completes the security fence. Having settlers closer to the completed fence would facilitate a movement of Israeli troops steadily westward away from the Palestinian centers, in tandem with efforts to safeguard central Israel from Palestinian rocket fire and terrorism. This would also enable antiterrorism measures now taken--such as roadblocks, barriers, and inspections-- to be scaled back, making it easier to link up Palestinian towns and cities.
• Israel cooperates with the quartet and envoy Blair to develop the Palestinian economy in the hope it will motivate more Palestinians to focus on building their own state rather than on destroying the Israeli state. Here, expectations should be moderated by the fact that economic improvement to date has not changed the politics of terrorism, which have been driven not by the have-nots but rather by the want-mores, by those who have a higher education and living standard than most Palestinians.
• On the Palestinian side, the overriding requirement is that Abbas shuts off all and every incitement to hatred and violence.