Meeting in Madrid: A Chance for Peace : Every reason it won’t work--every reason it must

Secretary of State James A. Baker III earlier this week summed up in a few words the enormous issues to be addressed in the historic Middle East peace conference scheduled to convene in Madrid Oct. 30.

The magic words, said Baker, are “land for peace”--the land referring to the territory Israel has occupied and moved to colonize since it repelled attacks by Syria and Jordan in 1967, the peace referring not just to an absence of war but to full, normal and productive relations between neighboring states. These are the big chips in the bargaining process. The hard part--many would even argue the impossible part, and they can still be proved right--will come in finding agreement on just what land Israel will withdraw from and what kind of peace it will get from its Arab adversaries. The territories at issue include the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Syria’s Golan Heights. The peace and acceptance of its political legitimacy that Israel seeks are goals it has pursued for more than 40 years.

Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union, which Friday resumed diplomatic relations with Israel after a break of 24 years, nor any of the conference participants can have any illusions about the magnitude and intensity of the problems that lie ahead. Both Israelis and Arabs will bring to their talks--if indeed the process reaches the intended early stage of direct negotiations--acute and bitter burdens of mistrust, growing out of memories and experiences of injustices past and present, real and supposed. On all sides will be found participants so fully convinced of the moral superiority and political rightness of their cause that the very notion of compromise has been all but excluded. On all sides will be those looking for a plausible excuse to collapse a conference that, by seeking to change the decades-long status quo, threatens the ideological underpinnings of their claims to political power. The rancor, the suspicions, the hostility that hang over the long Arab-Israeli conflict mean there will be no shortage of possible excuses.

But the agonizing days that lie ahead should not be allowed to dim the achievement of the moment. The invitations are going out to a conference whose objective, in President Bush’s words, “is nothing less than a just, lasting and comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

That things have reached this stage clearly has little to do with the enthusiasm of the participants for comprehensive negotiations that, to succeed, must include major concessions none of them really want to make. Success instead must be credited to the determination of Bush and Baker to persevere in the face of the most formidable obstacles.

Since the end of the war against Iraq the secretary of state has made eight trips to the Middle East, involving scores of hours of shuttle diplomacy. He has endured misunderstandings, deception, scorn and insults. It all goes with the territory, as Henry Kissinger, who trod similar paths in the mid-1970s, and Jimmy Carter, who brokered the 1979 peace between Egypt and Israel, undoubtedly warned him. What goes with the job as well is the satisfaction of knowing now that he has been instrumental in bringing one of the world’s more intractable conflicts at least to the starting line of civilized dialogue.

A journey that could well last for a thousand days or more begins with this by no means inconsiderable step.