Mideast: Losing Ground

Whatever feeble spark of life might yet remain in the Middle East peace process grew even dimmer last week when a much-heralded meeting between high British officials and representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization failed to come off. The London talks collapsed when the Palestinians refused to sign a previously agreed-to statement that spoke both of the right of Palestinian self-determination and of Israel’s right to a secure existence. The PLO charged that Britain had tinkered with the earlier accepted document. The British said they had not changed so much as a comma. King Hussein of Jordan, the PLO’s intended partner in any talks with Israel, said it was Britain that was telling the truth.

Hussein’s role is the significant one in what turned out to be another diplomatic fiasco for the PLO. Britain had hoped to demonstrate that the PLO was responsibly accepting the concept of peaceful coexistence with Israel without abandoning its owns claim to self-determination “within the context of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation.” This is pretty much along the lines of what Hussein says he and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat agreed to last February. But Arafat has never explicitly endorsed the king’s version of that agreement. The London communique would, in effect, have put the PLO on record as having done so. At the last minute Arafat reneged, alleging British perfidy. As Hussein indicated, it was not the British who were being perfidious.

So the king has now had what he took to be his understanding with the PLO shot out from under him, which is one reason why he is patching up his relations with Syria, his old enemy and Arafat’s more recent one. If the British-sponsored statement echoed the substance of the PLO-Jordan accord of eight months ago, the PLO’s refusal to sign it robs the earlier agreement of its validity. Before any joint Jordanian-Palestinian team is ready to go to the negotiating table it obviously must agree on what it wants and what it is ready to give up. The PLO and Jordan pretty clearly have not come to such a meeting of minds.

Israel, which wants nothing to do with the PLO in any case, has meanwhile come forward with its peace offering and in so doing exposed anew the bitter divisions within its own government. In an eloquent address to the United Nations, Prime Minister Shimon Peres repeated his call for direct negotiations with Jordan. What Peres has in mind is a territorial compromise on the West Bank that could produce a Jordanian-Palestinian federation but without a role for the PLO. This appeal, not surprisingly, has been rejected by Jordan. Hussein, as a matter of his own survival, has made clear time and again that he will make no move toward talks with Israel without the general approval of other Arabs and the specific concurrence of recognized Palestinian leaders. In February, Hussein thought he had that concurrence. Now he has learned otherwise.

Over the years and decades a lot of arbitrary and largely meaningless deadlines for political movement have been set in the Middle East. Now a real deadline looms. Next September, under the arrangement that brought the current coalition to power, the Likud Bloc is scheduled to take over the reins of government in Israel. Likud, unlike Peres and most of his Labor Alignment, has no interest in a territorial compromise on the West Bank, which means no willingness to change the status quo.

So this is where matters now stand in the peace process: Israel won’t negotiate with Arafat or with a PLO that has abandoned neither terrorism nor its publicly stated purpose of destroying Israel. Eleven months from now a new Israeli government will almost certainly slam the door on negotiating with anyone at all. The PLO on its part refuses to utter the magic words and commit itself to accepting Israel’s right to exist and live securely in peace. And King Hussein refuses to go it alone in peace talks with Israel. The peace process, in short, now stands bereft of active participants, and exhortations from the sidelines seem unlikely to change that. If real change is to come, it will only be when those most directly involved decide that they in fact have something to talk about. That prospect, rather than drawing nearer, has been steadily receding.