Why the Pressure on Israel Mounts

“I am convinced the conditions have today been created to enable us to go ahead with a meeting of the foreign ministers of Israel, Egypt and the United States .... We are now in a position to take the first step toward peace with the Palestinians which is firmly anchored in political reality .... We cannot be obstacles to moving ahead .... Whoever wants to start a peace process in Israel has to start with the Palestinians. There is no other way.”

Those are the statesmanlike words of Israel’s hard-nosed Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. They’re welcome, but more welcome still would be an equally unambiguous and politically decisive statement from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir appears to have spent most of the last 10 months looking for reasons not to support his own plan for Palestinian elections. Now, under American pressure and the Labor Party’s threat to break up the coalition government, Shamir is said by aides to be inching toward acceptance of U.S. ideas to get talks started. That’s fine, but what the occasion demands, as Rabin perceives, is not movement in inches but a great leap forward.

The United States, accepted by all sides as the irreplaceable facilitator of any Israeli-Palestinian talks, seemingly is running out of patience with the divided Israeli cabinet’s inability to come to a decision. A few days ago Secretary of State James A. Baker III told Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens that Egypt, acting as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s surrogate, has made constructive compromises. Baker pointedly asked Israel if it was ready to move forward. It’s Baker’s latest ideas that Rabin and Finance Minister and Labor Party leader Shimon Peres now endorse.

The blunt American message is that there are no more plausible excuses to delay further. The first step is to start the tripartite ministerial talks that will aim to agree on the composition of a Palestinian delegation to meet with Israeli officials in Cairo. Those talks are supposed to fix the conditions under which West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians would elect a delegation to negotiate the political future of the territories with Israel. At best that process promises to consume many months. But what Rabin calls the first step toward peace has presented itself. It would be a historic mistake not to seize the moment and take that step.