Israel Divided

The United States has actively reinvolved itself in Middle East peace efforts, reluctantly because there’s little hope for progress any time soon, necessarily because all experience makes clear that unless Washington takes a direct role, there is almost no chance that the Arab and Israeli sides will be able to agree on anything. This time around, though, the prospect of movement seems especially thin, and the main reason for immobility is to be found in Jerusalem. The deep rift between the uneasy partners in the coalition government has made it virtually impossible for Israel to arrive at a decision about what it should do next.

That deadlock reflects fundamental differences over the shape and direction of the country’s geographic and political future. The Labor Party half of the coalition is prepared to give up some of the West Bank if Israel can get peace in return, and it is ready to negotiate with Palestinians representing the Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip provided they aren’t openly members of the PLO.

The Likud half of the coalition on its part remains ideologically committed to yielding nothing on the West Bank that would diminish Israel’s claim to sovereignty. It excludes the possibility of territorial compromise, or of any change in the political status of the Palestinians except, at some point, to allow them a very limited form of self-rule.

This is the essential background to all the maneuvering that has been going on since May, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, under U.S. pressure to do something constructive in response to the Palestinian intifada , offered a heavily conditioned plan for local Palestinian elections. Since then Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak has made a 10-point proposal to implement Israeli-Palestinian talks that has been welcomed by Israel’s Labor Party and the U.S. government, but scorned by Shamir and the Likud.

Shamir has similarly rejected Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s suggestion this week for a U.S.-Israel-Egypt foreign ministers’ meeting to nudge things along. All this is raising further questions in Washington, not least on the part of some of Israel’s strongest supporters in Congress, about whether Shamir is now or indeed ever was serious about negotiating realistically over the West Bank. Shamir’s answer would be, of course he’s ready to talk, but only on his terms. But when half the Israeli government finds those terms wanting, can anyone seriously expect that Palestinians would find them acceptable?