ISRAEL FACING REALITY : Buying Time? Or Buying a Backlash? : The refusal to negotiate with Palestinians must stop before the rest of the world turns on the Jewish state.

It is time to reckon with reality. Neither Israel nor the Palestine Liberation Organization can impose its conditions and achieve complete victory. The only possible solution is a negotiated one, based on compromise, which will provide both Palestinians and Israelis equal status in two independent states.

Israel cannot circumvent the Palestinians and reach a settlement with the Arab states. As recently as their summit meeting in Casablanca last May, the Arab states reiterated that the PLO represents the Palestinians and that the Palestinian problem is the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Left to their own, the Israelis and the Palestinians are incapable of reaching a settlement. Those in both camps calling for direct negotiations between the two sides only throw dust in our eyes to conceal their real aim: not negotiations, but an imposition of their conditions and the total surrender of the adversary.

However, there is this difference between the contestants: On the Palestinian side, moderates are at the helm, while on the Israeli side, even though there may be a short-lived government formed by Shimon Peres, the hard-liners of the Likud dominate political life. Such an asymmetry produces instability. It may end with hard-liners holding sway on both sides.

The Palestinian moderates cannot hold their ground forever, withstanding the pressure of hard-liners who reproach them for the concessions they have offered in accepting the two-state formula and U.N. Resolution 242 and acknowledging Israel’s right to exist. Time is thus a factor of utmost importance; tarrying any longer won’t buy hope, but disaster.

I do not blame everything on Israel, of course. Frequently PLO declarations--residue from previous positions that have not all been abandoned, or radical expressions that imply intentions to reach the old goals by stages--are ominous in themselves, and they play into the hands of Israeli hard-liners.

What should Israel do? It should give the Palestinians incentives to stick to their moderate positions. Anwar Sadat, after all, did not come to Jerusalem on his own but because he had been apprised of Israel’s readiness to recognize Egyptian sovereignty over all of the Sinai. Palestinians can rightly ask why they should moderate their position when they have repeatedly heard from Yitzhak Shamir that they will get no territory at all, only autonomy under Israeli domination.

Negotiations are never a plunge into the unknown. They start only after the parameters and the main lines of the settlement are agreed on beforehand. The negotiations themselves apply only to details.

Here, the only possible common denominator as a basis for negotiations is U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to withdraw “to secure and recognized boundaries.” The PLO accepted 242 in December. But Israel, under the leadership of the Likud, retracted its support for 242 by declaring its refusal to withdraw from even one square inch of the occupied territories.

During the 1978 Camp David talks, Menachem Begin gave up the Sinai to keep the West Bank. Jimmy Carter unfortunately acceded to this. Thereafter, for Begin and the Likud leadership, the return of the Sinai to Egypt exonerated Israel from having to withdraw from the West Bank. So, to move forward again, the meaning of 242 has to be elucidated beforehand by the international community, foremost by the United States, in order to prevent the immediate stalemating of negotiations because of bickering over the resolution’s meaning.

Although 242 does not spell out what is meant by Israeli “withdrawal to secure and recognized boundaries,” in my view that means, approximately, the “green line” boundaries from before the 1967 war. In the past, Israel might have been able to get better conditions, but not now.

In the Camp David accord, Israel acknowledged its recognition of “the Palestinian people’s legitimate rights and their just requirements.” Again, unfortunately, the United States failed to ask Begin to clarify what this phrase meant for him. The Palestinians should make a similar acknowledgement regarding the Israelis. Then both sides will have to spell out what they mean by this phrase.

To me, the meaning is clear. The “legitimate rights and just requirements” of both peoples is for each to have their own state. Elementary justice can only mean that one side cannot arrogate unto itself a right which is denied to the other.

It will not be easy to get from the two sides, and particularly from Israel, an endorsement of the elucidated Resolution 242 and the definition of rights. The demand to do so will undoubtedly create a storm in the Likud because the claims of the party’s platform negate 242.

This raises a basic problem: the need for the international community to challenge a political party that has adopted a position contrary to international conventions and norms. But, better a crisis before negotiations start than a crisis at their first stage.

Religiously, I hold to the belief that in history, between states and within states, there is a mechanism of rectification and retribution. It operates clumsily, allowing states and peoples the extravagance of pursuing aggressive and unjust policies, transgressing the rights of others, until these states overreach themselves. Then punishment by mankind itself, reacting against their excesses, befalls them with a vengeance. I cannot resign myself to the idea that Hitler was defeated only as an accident of history, or that the Communist regimes collapsed by sheer chance.

I am haunted by the thought that Israel is overreaching itself by refusing to acknowledge that the Palestinians deserve to choose their own representation; by criminalizing the PLO and thus criminalizing the whole Palestinian people, who hail the PLO as their leadership; by claiming that Israeli refusal to withdraw from the occupied territories and allow a Palestinian state is only a response to Palestinian viciousness and does not stem from crude Israeli territorial ambitions. By overreaching itself in these ways, I fear that Israel is inviting a historical retribution, a retribution that will affect not only Israel but will harm Jews everywhere.