PERSPECTIVE ON THE MIDDLE EAST : Strife in Parts, Peace as a Whole

With Israel apparently poised to install a new, ultra-right government, it is unclear whether President Bush has accepted defeat in his campaign for peace in the Middle East--or is preparing an offensive based on a fresh diplomatic strategy.

What is obvious is that the “peace program” presented to the White House by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir last year, based on elections in the occupied territories, is dead. In fact, it was never really a peace program at all but a sham to divert Bush from his course. The only surprise is that it collapsed so quickly. Shamir himself buried it by attaching conditions to the elections that would have made them palpably meaningless.

To endorse the Shamir plan, President Bush had to withdraw his support from the proposal for an international peace conference, which the Soviet Union, Western Europe and most of the Arab states had endorsed. Aware now that he’d been had by Shamir, his best move would be to reaffirm his commitment to an international conference as the only format on the current diplomatic agenda that holds any real promise for peace.

President Bush bought Shamir’s ideabecause he was not yet weaned from his Cold War reflexes. His goal was to keep Moscow out of the peace-making game. But during the past year, that attitude has changed, with Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Bush adopting, for all practical purposes, a common world view. In the Middle East, the two have the common interest in preventing war from breaking out.

In Iraq last month, President Saddam Hussein made it very clear that the next Middle East war would not be quick and clean like its predecessors. Obsessed by the bombing of his nuclear-weapons facility in 1981 by Israel’s last ultra-right government, Hussein warned that he would retaliate next time Israel attacked by incinerating half of the country with chemicals. The recent arms build-up in the region persuades even the Israelis that he is not just boasting. Bush and Gorbachev both fear getting sucked into such a war.

In the past, Syria was considered an obstacle to an international conference. But last week, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak was received in Damascus, signaling an end to President Hafez Assad’s implacable hostility to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of a decade ago. Sources around Mubarak say that Assad is now prepared to recognize Israel and attend an international conference as soon as the Israelis declare their willingness to negotiate a full settlement with the Arab states and with the Palestinians.

Next week, Mubarak travels to Moscow, where he and Gorbachev are planning to renew the effort to organize an international conference. They are expected to propose a preparatory meeting of foreign ministers in Geneva within the coming months to set the ground rules for the negotiating sessions.

For Israel, of course, an international conference would require a spirit of compromise, chiefly on the issue of territory, that is far removed from the intransigence that Shamir currently displays to the world. But if the Shamir people dominate Israeli politics, it is by no means clear that they control public opinion. The past two months’ maneuvering demonstrates, on the one hand, the inadequacy of Israel’s political system; on the other, it has revealed great popular discontent. With a little persuasion from Bush, Israel might well be persuaded to take a chair at an international conference.

The Shamir plan promised, at best, to isolate and bandage a tiny part of the Middle East conflict: the West Bank-Gaza problem. The advantage of the international conference is that it takes the conflict for what it is--a mix of many parts, each linked to the others--and proposes to deal with it as a whole.

Simply stated, Syria will do what it can to block peace on the West Bank-Gaza issue as long as its own grievances on the Golan Heights are ignored; Jordan cannot feel secure without a legally recognized boundary with Israel; Lebanon’s only hope for a settlement of its civil war depends on a Syrian-Israeli agreement on troop withdrawal; until the status of refugees in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon is resolved, the Palestinian problem will remain destabilizing.

As for Iraq, now the most menacing of Israel’s enemies, it regularly restates its position: It will sign a peace treaty with Israel on any terms to which the Palestinians agree.

The Bush Administration did Israel no favors by endorsing the Shamir plan. Camp David, an incomplete peace, did not make the Middle East safer. For Israelis to live in security, a peace treaty must address the concerns of the entire region.

President Bush will serve America’s interests, as well as Israel’s, by sweeping clean the agenda of the Middle East conflict. An international conference offers a realistic negotiating format. It can produce a package deal--tempting to all parties, Israeli included, in containing both gains and concessions. Now is the time for the Bush Administration to embrace it.