Terrible Surprises May Await if U.S., Israel Can’t Speak Same Terms

A most unusual public exchange of recriminations has taken place between two countries of the closest political and strategic intimacy. Below this surface storm is the conflict of some basic concepts of American and Israeli policy.

The two governments are no longer talking about the same things. Their partnership, seen as the natural expression of a common cause, actually rests increasingly on deep differences that have been papered over. Left unresolved, these are more likely to lead to terrible surprises than to a lasting constructive relationship.

The spotlight for the moment is on the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel officially calls them the “administered” territories. The distinction is not merely semantic. In a nutshell Israel asserts that it has liberated, not occupied, these areas. Several far-reaching disagreements flow from this proposition. If the land is not “occupied,” its future is a matter not of international negotiation but of domestic administration by Israel.

The United States asserts that the West Bank and Gaza are occupied and very directly an international issue, governed by the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. This treaty, to which Israel and all its neighbors are parties, applies explicitly to occupied territories--which means to the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. The Golan was annexed by Israel in 1981 --an act that the United States joined in repudiating as null and void and without international legal effect.

Among many social and legal safeguards spelled out by the Fourth Geneva Convention is a prohibition of the deportations to which the United States specifically objects, as it does also to the practice of administrative detention now very much in use. The occupying power is further forbidden to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory that it occupies. This raises the issue of Israeli settlements, grown steadily over the years to more than 60,000 settlers in 118 communities. President Jimmy Carter called them an obstacle to peace. In 1982 President Reagan’s dramatic peace initiative, repeatedly reaffirmed since then, urged a freeze on settlements, adding that their final status must be negotiated and that the United States would not support their continuation as extraterritorial outposts.

Another basic U.S. position, anathema to Israeli governments, is that U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 applies to the West Bank and Gaza and requires Israeli withdrawal in return for peace. This contradicts Israel’s proposition that the requirement of withdrawal “from occupied territories” has been satisfied by its withdrawal from Sinai. The United States has also dismissed the contention that the political problem of Palestine can be resolved by making Jordan a Palestinian state. Reagan envisages a peace process under the Camp David accords with a “peaceful and orderly transfer of authority from Israel to the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza.” Like Israel, Reagan does not want an independent Palestinian state, but rather an entity linked with Jordan--perhaps in confederation. Unlike Israel, he says, “We will not support annexation or permanent control by Israel.”

Underlying these and other specific points of difference are profound divergences of view between the United States and Israel. For one thing, Washington will not countenance another Israeli attempt to solve a political problem by force, as it did with its invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The United States sees the issue of Palestinian rights as a major political problem. And, more important, it sees this in a changed strategic context. The Arab-Israeli dispute, however tragic for those engaged, is local and limited by comparison with other pressing dangers in the Middle East.

Yet there is no sign that America, burdened with these concerns, has any intention of pressing Israel to be more compliant. And that is not to be explained only in terms of our Jewish community in an election year. The links between the two countries are too deep and strong for Americans to gamble Israel’s security against some questionable appeasement. The Arab side, with too few exceptions, has not signaled its readiness to respond to compromise.

Events on the ground speak their own increasingly shrill and menacing language. They say that it is time for reassessment in terms of present reality.

Reagan put it correctly in 1982: “The question now is how to reconcile Israel’s legitimate security rights with the legitimate rights of the Palestinians . . . . True peace will require compromises by all.” What he has not said since is that his initiative of 1982 was torpedoed by both sides with hardly a complaint from Washington. What he should say now is that history will not tolerate five more years of cheap rhetoric and misfired power plays and that the United States will precipitate the long-suspended peace process with the proclamation of its own clear views.