COLUMN LEFT : A U.S. Plan by Israel, for Israel : Arab nations can only take the Baker proposals as a joke.

It takes a war to make people optimistic about the potential for peace. And so it was that President Bush declared in late January that “when this war is over, the United States, its credibility and its reliability restored, will have a key leadership role in helping to bring peace to the rest of the Middle East.”

The war concluded, Bush duly promulgated his Mideast peace plan and Secretary of State James A. Baker III commenced his wanderings between Tel Aviv, Damascus, Riyadh and other staging posts on what has turned out to be the road to nowhere. There are intransigent Arabs and an intransigent Israel. The familiar hunt for the perfect Palestinian negotiating partner continues. Only the tenacity of honest broker Baker keeps the peace show from ending up in the ditch.

This is the absurd scenario foisted on Americans by their government--abetted by most of the press, which solemnly reports the farcical ritual of the “search for peace” as though it could conceivably have any chance of success, which it most plainly does not.

Start with the Baker plan, which turns out to be the Yitzhak Shamir plan, and which the United States is alone in endorsing. Actually the Baker-Shamir plan is really the coalition plan of Likud and Labor and should therefore be called the Baker-Shamir-Shimon Peres plan, whose three central premises are: There can be no “additional Palestinian state” (since such a state already exists, in the shape of Jordan); the Palestinians are not to be permitted their own representatives (in other words, no PLO); and no change in the status of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza, other than in accord with the basic guidelines of the government of Israel.

Anyone wanting a clear idea of what these “basic guidelines” consist of has merely to listen to Shamir. The prime minister declared on Israeli TV April 10: “No Israeli government has decided or committed itself to stop building in Judea, Samaria and Gaza--and this will not happen. We will continue to build there. This is an issue that has no relation to the negotiations between us and the Arab states. . . . This is an internal affair.”

At the onset of Baker’s visit, Shamir chose to attend the opening of the museum dedicated to his old crowd, the terrorist Stern gang, murderers of Lord Moyne and Count Bernadotte. A postcard in the museum is adorned with a fine map of the Stern gang’s ideal of a Greater Israel. It’s as though, in one of the delicate sessions now ongoing on the future of Northern Ireland, the Irish prime minister started singing “A Nation Once Again” in the face of Britain’s ambassador.

So what does the Baker-Shamir-Peres plan offer Palestinians? It calls for “free elections” under Israeli military occupation, while any Palestinians whom Israel finds unwelcome are arrested, humiliated, tortured, expelled. This is the reality. The main objective for Israel in the past three years has been the crushing of the intifada, a goal that has now--with unspeakable brutalities--been largely achieved. This Israeli rejectionism, abetted and endorsed by the United States, was in force long before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and long before the PLO’s posture on that invasion permitted the United States to say that it had become an “unacceptable” negotiating party.

For Israel, the Baker “peace round” is the scrim behind which the final crushing of Palestinian aspirations takes place, with West Bank agriculture destroyed by curfew and theft of Palestinian water rights, with Palestinian jobs in Israel proper severely circumscribed, with Soviet Jews filling the space left by Palestinians “transferred” by economic duress and the severity of military occupation to . . . somewhere else. It doesn’t need the coercion of an army to make a place empty out, as anyone visiting the west of Ireland will soon discover.

For Palestinians who remain, there will be, as Noam Chomsky recently wrote, liberty under the Baker-Shamir-Peres plan to “set local tax rates in Nablus and collect garbage in Ramallah.”

Of course Hafez Assad of Syria is a butcher and a tyrant, but what in this instance does Syrian intransigence amount to? Like almost every nation in the world beyond rejectionist Israel and rejectionist America, Syria calls for a proper international conference under U.N. auspices.

There will never be any advance toward a settlement of outstanding issues in the Middle East unless the United States is prepared to get tough with Israel. The only way to do this is to impose or to threaten--as Eisenhower and Dulles did in 1953 and again in 1956--a cutoff of aid. Unless the Israeli government perceives that this is a serious card in the U.S. poker hand, talk of honest brokerage or a “key leadership role” is a demeaning fraud.