Changing Chairs

Israelis seem generally content after the first 25 months of their National Unity government and this week, as the top jobs in that coalition were swapped between Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, the signs indicate that they would be equally satisfied with 25 months more. The reasons are apparent. After a half-decade of politics that always seemed to be conducted at white-heat, after the debacle of the Lebanon war, after an inflation that soared above 400%, a government forced on Israel by electoral deadlock has brought relative political calm, restored more-or-less peace, and imposed economic controls that have brought inflation down to a tolerable level. Credit Peres’ leadership for much of this. It is no small thing to steer a country that had gone wildly off course back to a safer and saner heading.

Whether Shamir will continue on that course, as he moves from the foreign minister’s office to the prime minister’s, will now be tested. True to the principles of his Likud Party, Shamir has already indicated that will try to return to the controversial and costly program of building new settlements in the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Perilous economic necessity as well as Labor Party opposition brought such settlement expansion pretty much to a halt over the last two years. Israel’s economy remains far from robust. An early ideological test of strength within the government could come soon between those who would deepen Israel’s grip on the occupied lands and those opposed to continued annexation.

Peres worked hard if with only limited success to better Israel’s relations with Egypt and to seek an accommodation with Jordan. He would like to pursue those efforts as foreign minister, but it will be for Shamir and the rest of the cabinet to decide whether he will be allowed to. As the rotation in Israel has taken place various Arab leaders have been quick to profess that they don’t see a shekel’s worth of difference between Peres’ foreign policy and what Shamir, on the evidence of experience, is likely to follow. Such a view, however, says more about the inertia of Arab political leaders than it does about their political realism.

The major and compelling difference between Peres and Shamir is Peres’ readiness to discuss a territorial compromise that could see Israel restore Jordanian administrative control to much of the West Bank. Shamir, though he hasn’t closed the door on greater autonomy for West Bank Palestinians, regards the West Bank as an integral and non-negotiable part of Israel.

Because he was willing to talk about compromise, Peres forced the Palestine Liberation Organization and Jordan to the brink of hard choice. Jordan was up to the challenge, the PLO was not, and so another opportunity for positive movement was lost. Shamir, whose adamancy on the issue of territorial compromise precisely reflects that of the Arab rejectionists, is unlikely to repeat that challenge. A lot of Israelis are quite comfortable with that position. So, as the record shows, are a lot of Arabs.