Time Is Foe, Arabs Believe, as Israelis Settle West Bank : Hopes for Mideast Peace Talks Growing

“Time,” said Elias Freij, the mayor of Bethlehem, “is our greatest enemy.

“With every passing day, the Israelis are digging in,” the 66-year-old Palestinian said. “While Arabs are chatting, Israeli bulldozers are working, building settlements.”

Surveying the sun-bleached hills of the Holy Land from the steps of his office, Freij sounds almost desperate in his desire to see talks open between the Arabs and Israel.

“Otherwise, 20 years from now,” Freij adds, pointing to his town, “all of this will be Jewish. My loyalty is to the ground, to Arab land.”

Perhaps now more than at any time in the last few years, there is rising optimism that negotiations will take place to finally settle the Middle East crisis. But, beneath the optimism, there is a familiar layer of disbelief and doubt. After all, the Middle East is as littered with failed peace initiatives as it is with the debris of war.

“Either the Arab peace efforts are met on the Israeli side and supported by Western Europe and the United States,” said Chedli Klibi, secretary general of the Tunis-based Arab League, or “Israel can continue to reject all peace settlements and continue its policy of force. . . . In this (latter) case I can only envision darkness, for Israel as well as for the Arabs. Lebanon has given us a taste of this darkness.”

The Arabs and Israelis have fought five major conflicts since Israel was established by U.N. mandate in 1948. The wars have cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and each of the conflicts, while different in a number of respects, had the “Palestinian problem” at its roots.

It has seemed an intractable problem: How to reconcile Israel’s desire to live secure from the threat of Arab attack with the demands of more than 4 million Arab refugees, the Palestinians, for the vaguely defined right of “self-determination”--usually interpreted as meaning an independent Palestinian state.

Much of the current optimism is based on a new initiative launched last November by Jordan’s King Hussein.

Hussein appeared before a meeting of the Palestine National Council, a sort of parliament in exile for the Palestinians, and offered to pursue with the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization a joint approach to peace with Israel.

In February, the process moved a step further when Hussein and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO, agreed to a “joint framework” for peace that included a call for an international conference to settle the conflict and a solution that envisaged a “confederation” between Jordan and the Palestinian West Bank.

Gone was the rhetoric about driving Israel into the sea.

While it is far from clear that the new initiative will have any success, Hussein was reported to have found a sympathetic response in Washington, whose support is generally regarded as crucial in reaching an accommodation with Israel.

White House Objection

(Because of Hussein’s initiative, the Reagan Administration is known to object to a provision in a foreign aid bill adopted by the House last week that would deny sophisticated weaponry such as aircraft and air defense systems to Jordan until that country formally recognizes Israel and joins the Mideast peace process.)

“There certainly seems to be some movement,” said one Western diplomat who has studied the peace process. “But keep in mind that all the movement has been over procedural matters, such as who will take part in the talks, and they haven’t addressed any basic issues. That’s where the headaches begin.”

There has been little progress toward peace in the Middle East since March 26, 1979, when Egypt and Israel signed a treaty that put an end to hostilities between the two countries and provided a timetable for Israeli withdrawal from occupied Egyptian lands in the Sinai Peninsula.

Self-Governing Entity

The treaty also provided for beginning negotiations, which Jordan was invited to join, with the aim of creating a self-governing entity in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, areas that Israel captured from Jordan and Egypt, respectively, during the 1967 Six-Day War.

In retrospect, it is difficult to see how any of the parties genuinely expected the negotiations to succeed.

“The Camp David treaty assigned roles to both the Palestinians and King Hussein without ever consulting them. It was a complete non-starter,” noted one Arab academician.

Hussein, whose grandfather had been crowned King of All Palestine in December, 1948, acidly described the Egypt-Israel peace treaty as “a separate peace which cannot lead to a just and comprehensive peace.”

Arafat prophetically speculated that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, one of the architects of the treaty, would meet a violent end, and he called for a complete boycott of the United States because of President Jimmy Carter’s role in helping negotiate the treaty.

Protest in Damascus

In Damascus, 500,000 Syrians marched to protest the signing of the treaty and tried to get the matter placed before the U.N. Security Council.

Pundits at the time recalled Henry A. Kissinger’s famous epigram: “There can be no war without Egypt, but no peace without Syria.”

A senior Western military analyst in the region said: “Not only is Israel strong, but Israel is now stronger than ever before. Sure, Syria has a lot of arms, but when it comes right down to it, the Israelis could whip the pants off them, and the Syrians know it. Behind the rhetoric, the Syrians have a healthy respect and understanding of Israeli’s military strength.”

That strength has been tested, as never before, in Lebanon. In the second week of June, the Israel Defense Forces announced that it had completed its formal withdrawal from Lebanon, three years after invading the country in an effort to forever rid Israel’s northern border of the threat from Palestinian guerrillas.

Withdrawal Not Complete

Five hundred Israeli “military advisers” remain in a security zone along the border, so the withdrawal is not complete. But the Lebanon war is still generally regarded in the Arab world as Israel’s first defeat.

The Israeli retreat was brought about largely as the result of attacks by Shia Muslim extremists who carried out a series of suicide attacks, such as driving cars laden with explosives into Israeli convoys at a great loss of life.

Valerie Yorke, who has written a book on Israel and Jordan for the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said Palestinians now frequently wonder why they have been unable to match the Shias’ success against the Israelis.

“If Hussein and Arafat fail in their current initiative, the Palestinians who have watched the Shias succeed may think it’s time for a change of tactics,” she said. “If I were an Israeli general, I would be a bit nervous that all those tanks were not in the least useful in Lebanon.”

Two Different Situations

A senior adviser to the Jordanian government, who asked that he not be identified, remarked that the vastly different situations prevailing in the West Bank and in southern Lebanon indicated that it is unlikely that Shia-style terrorism could be adopted effectively by the Palestinians.

“The Israelis have a more massive presence in the West Bank than in southern Lebanon,” the official said. “In Lebanon, arms were freely available, and people thought they had to defend themselves.

“The Palestinians have depended on other Arabs to make decisions for them. Today, they are just as dependent on other Arabs as they were 10 years ago.”

While the Israelis have shown little sign that they are prepared to make significant concessions for a settlement of the crisis at this time, a combination of factors has given the appearance, at least, that the Arabs are taking a more flexible position.

Moderate Arab Axis

The creation of a “moderate axis” in the Arab world--of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and the PLO--may produce sufficient strength to resist efforts by Syria and Libya to undo any peace talks that leave them out of the equation.

Hussein is said to believe that the reelection of President Reagan has for the first time in two decades left a stable U.S. Administration in power for a second term, thus presumably less concerned--at least for the first two years--with election worries. The theory is that Reagan may be able to pressure Israel now while he couldn’t before.

In fact, Reagan proposed a peace initiative of his own in September, 1982, after the evacuation of PLO forces from Beirut.

The Reagan plan, in fact, was remarkably similar to the plan put forward by Hussein. It called for autonomy for residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in confederation with Jordan. Israel rejected the Reagan initiative the day after it was announced.

Realignment Within PLO

Perhaps most important for the peace process, a drastic realignment of forces within the PLO has left Arafat with a smaller power base but firmly in control of his organization without the need to seek a consensus with the more radical elements.

The PLO’s reorganization was engineered by Syria, which had been working without success to oust Arafat as leader. Instead, six of the most radical groups in the PLO have now joined in a Palestinian Salvation Front based in Damascus. It was this thinning out of the radical Palestinians that has permitted virtually all the progress reported thus far.

Arafat now has only a power base in Tunis, several thousand miles from the land he calls Palestine, and no significant military option to use against Israel.

Thus, the Jordanian option may have seemed the only way out, even though feelings still run high among many Palestinians about Jordan’s expulsion of the PLO in 1970.

Right to Security

A major obstacle to peace talks has always been the PLO’s refusal to accept U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which assures the nations of the region the right to exist within secure boundaries.

The Palestinians say they have refused to accept Resolution 242 because it refers to the Palestinians simply as refugees.

But even that stance appears to be changing, with Hussein remarking during his recent trip to Washington that Arafat is now prepared to accept the resolution as the basis for talks.

The PLO has even dropped its demand for recognition by Israel as the Palestinians’ sole legitimate representative, demanding instead a far milder commitment from Washington to work for the right of self-determination.

The Palestinians have frequently been accused of accepting “last year’s peace plan,” meaning that by the time the PLO gets around to accepting Israel’s conditions, the conditions have changed.

Peace the Only Benefit

There are elements of this problem present at the moment. Asked during a recent radio interview about Hussein’s agreement to negotiate on the basis of exchanging peace for territory, former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon remarked that the Arabs would only get one thing in exchange for peace--peace.

Other Israeli officials have taken a similar hard line. In March, 1979, Prime Minister Menachem Begin predicted: “Israel will never go back to its pre-June, 1967, borders. Israel will never allow the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. Reunified Jerusalem will eternally remain Israel’s capital and will never again be divided.”

Among Western observers, too, there is the conviction that the Arabs will never be able to win Israeli agreement to withdraw entirely from the areas occupied during the 1967 war, especially Jerusalem, and that without that withdrawal, there probably would not be much chance of a settlement.

“It may be too late already,” Hussein said in a recent television broadcast. “We hope and pray it isn’t. This is the 11th hour. . . . “