Shamir’s Plan Undercut

Nothing has changed, insisted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s spokesman after the Likud Party’s central committee met in Tel Aviv this week to pass judgment on the premier’s peace initiative. Well, hardly. What’s changed is that Shamir’s proposal for local Palestinian elections on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, made grudgingly and only under strong U.S. pressure, has now been so loaded down with demands and disincentives as to deny it virtually any credibility it may have had to serve as a basis for negotiations.

Shamir’s idea for letting Palestinians vote to choose representatives who would then talk with Israel about the area’s political future had the endorsement of both the coalition government and the Knesset. What it lacked--what it could not by its nature hope to attract--was the approval of Likud’s far right-wing. Faced with a potential party revolt that could have led to his own ouster, Shamir chose to effectively torpedo his own plan by openly espousing conditions that no potential Palestinian interlocutor could accept.

The explicit conditions insisted upon by Trade Minister Ariel Sharon and other Likud hard-liners are that Arab residents of East Jerusalem couldn’t run or vote in any election; that no voting could occur until the 18-month-old Palestinian uprising ends; that Jewish settlement-building in Gaza and the West Bank would go on, and that Israel would neither give up territory nor ever accept a Palestinian state.

As it happens, Shamir himself has often stated his affection for these ideas. As a tactical matter, though, he had decided not to embrace them publicly in connection with his proposal because, as an aide explained the other day, he wanted to keep his plan flexible enough to attract Palestinian participation. Sharon and other opponents of negotiations fear any flexibility because they see in it the potential for political compromise. Like the absolutists within Palestinian ranks, they abhor any notion of compromise. They are honest about their intentions: They want it all, and they want it on their terms alone.

The Labor Party, committed to seeking a compromise political solution with the Palestinians and not ruling out a trade of land for peace, must now decide whether it can in conscience continue its coalition arrangement with Likud. Shamir’s newly redefined peace proposal is not what the cabinet or the Knesset endorsed. It is instead, implicitly in intent and explicitly in statement, a rigid expression of Likud ideology. If Labor quits the coalition, Israelis would soon have another chance to trek to the polls and determine whether they approve of that ideology.