Jewish Settlements Aren’t Blocking Peace : Mideast: The U.S. failed to push the Arabs into negotiations after the Gulf War, and is simply taking it out on Israel.

Anyone who reads the memoirs of Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat and Moshe Dayan finds that they all agree on one major component of the success of the 1978 Camp David talks. Because Sadat, as Egyptian president, had ended his nation’s 30-year boycott of Israel and declared his willingness to visit Jerusalem and negotiate face-to-face, then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin was willing to bargain land for peace.

Sadat and Egypt, of course, were great winners at Camp David. He returned to Cairo with the entire Sinai Peninsula, which had been captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Yet tough-minded Israelis hailed the decision. The price was worth the sacrifice of precious lives, even the risks of a cold peace.

Today is no different. I recently conferred in Israel with government officials, journalists, academicians, religious leaders and ordinary citizens, among them newly arrived Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, and one thing is clear above all: Israelis are as anxious as ever for peace.

They are bewildered, however, about the failure of the efforts of President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III to deliver it. And they are increasingly confused and angered by the recent U.S. attempt to link a $10-billion housing-loan guarantee to a freeze on settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and by apparent pressure on Germany to withhold aid as well. Do Bush and Baker believe that the obstacle to peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is really the matter of settlements? “Could it be,” a savvy Middle East expert observed, “that Bush and Baker are using this linkage as a calculated ploy to deflect attention from their colossal failure to deliver negotiations between Arabs and Jews?”

In the celebration of victory over Saddaam Hussein, it looked as though Baker would succeed in creating the “new world order” envisioned by the President in August, 1990. U.S. men and women by the hundreds of thousands had saved Saudi Arabia and liberated Kuwait. Billions of dollars had been expended from our Treasury to make the Middle East safe for small and large Arab nations. Syria’s Hafez Assad was handed Lebanon, while the State Department looked the other way, as it does now while Syria purchases sophisticated arms from China and Western European dealers.

The Arab coalition cobbled together to oppose Saddam Hussein owed much to the United States. Bush and Baker were in the strongest position of any President and secretary of state since Carter and Cyrus Vance to transform the Mideast landscape from hostility to peace. Then they blew it.

Rather than exerting real pressure upon Saudi, Kuwaiti, Syrian and Jordanian leaders to follow Egypt and make peace with Israel, to enter into honest negotiations, Bush and Baker let themselves be pushed aside. First Saudi King Fahd announced he would not be the first, since he had no borders contiguous with Israel. Then Assad turned Sphinxlike, hinting, playing with Baker, all the while gaining his real objective, hegemony over Lebanon.

“Today we are back to square one,” I was recently told in Jerusalem. “Nothing has been accomplished. No Arab government is ready to break the barrier for peace.”

In the face of such failure, Bush and Baker are blaming Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Israel, threatening to withhold the loan guarantees desperately needed to settle 200,000 Soviet Jews expected in 1991, along with the heroically rescued black Jews from Ethiopia. How absurd, after the United States spent billions to rescue Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia, endangering so many young Americans.

Bush and Baker might still have a chance if they reversed their target and went back to Arab leaders, saying that unless they show readiness to negotiate, the West Bank and Gaza may be permanently settled and gone for good.

But the matter seems deeper than that. The State Department argues that the Jewish settlements are a serious “obstacle to peace.” How so? No Arab government makes such a claim. No Arab leader has announced that if Israel stops settling the few Jews who choose to build their homes on the West Bank that he will follow Sadat to Jerusalem. The mean truth is that the existence of Israel, after 43 years, is still the major obstacle for Arab leaders.

Abba Eban is fond of saying that the tragedy of the Palestinians is that “they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Unfortunately, that is true of U.S. Middle East policy since the Gulf War. Punishing Israel and its humanitarian refugee effort will not help. It will simply lead to a gross miscarriage of justice and another missed opportunity for peace.