Pessimism in Madrid Could Be an Advantage

More than a decade ago, when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem and touched off the process that produced history’s first--and only--Arab-Israeli peace treaty, the world seemed new and the prospects for Middle East harmony unbounded.

But the lofty hopes generated by the Israeli-Egyptian treaty were never realized. Euphoria turned to disillusionment and old animosities re-emerged.

Egypt and Israel remain at peace, but their relationship falls far short of friendship. And no other peace agreements have been reached in what is surely the world’s most intractable conflict.

On Wednesday, leaders of Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and the Palestinians plan to meet in Madrid for the most comprehensive Middle East peace conference ever attempted, but there is none of the exhilaration that marked the Camp David talks in 1978.

Instead, both the Arabs and the Israelis are reluctant participants, all fearful that they have more to lose than to gain from the talks.

From the standpoint of the American organizers of the Madrid conference, the sour mood is both a challenge and an opportunity. Washington must find some way to keep the talks going, and U.S. officials admit that so far they do not have a sure-fire way of doing it.

But there are advantages to depressed expectations. If the delegates do not end up engaging in a fistfight, the conference may be regarded as a success. And successes can build on each other.

Even an acrimonious and unproductive meeting will break some old taboos. For instance, this will be the first face-to-face, high-level meeting between Syria and Israel, and it will be the first time ever that Palestinians have been represented in their own right in negotiations with Israel. At the very least, it seems certain that Middle East diplomacy will never be the same.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, an expert in the techniques of low-ball politics, has done nothing to dispel the idea that the conference faces daunting difficulties.

“I’d give Baker a gold star if he can get them in the room,” says Robert E. Hunter, a National Security Council staff expert during the Jimmy Carter Administration. “I’d give him a second gold star if he can get them to convene the bilateral groups. I would consider that a good week’s work, well done. (But) obviously the hard diplomatic effort on the issues only begins then.”

The real work of the peace conference will be done in a series of bilateral meetings between Israel and each of its immediate neighbors--Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians.

Officially, Jordan and the Palestinians will present a joint delegation, but U.S. officials expect that the Jordanians will emerge predominant on issues pertaining to Jordan while the Palestinians will take the lead on matters affecting the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The most difficult talks will be Israeli-Palestinian, over the future of the West Bank and Gaza, and Israeli-Syrian, over the Golan Heights. Israel captured all three territories during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and so far has refused to give any of them back.

In both of those negotiations, the Arab party will be seeking concrete territorial concessions from Israel, while the Israelis will be after something far less tangible--peace and diplomatic recognition.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, joined by most other Israelis from virtually the entire political spectrum, worries that Israel will be maneuvered into giving up real territory in exchange for hollow promises.

“Shamir is very cautious,” says Richard W. Murphy, a retired career diplomat who was the State Department’s top Middle East expert during the Ronald Reagan Administration. “(He believes that) the status quo, murky and unsettled as it is, is better than any outcome he can foresee. He is a reluctant partner. This attitude grows from his basic pessimism that his country is hated and will always be hated.”

Murphy said the United States and the Soviet Union, as co-sponsors, must find a way to convince Shamir that Israel is not alone in a hostile sea. President Bush plans to meet privately with Shamir in Madrid before the talks, presumably to convey such a message. But U.S.-Israeli relations are so strained by the struggle over Israel’s request for $10 billion in housing loan guarantees that Shamir may very well discount Bush’s reassurances.

The Arabs are also afraid that they will be pressured into making a deal they do not like. “We are going, as we all agree, to make peace with Israel,” says a Syrian official. “But we know Israel. Shamir is saying no land for peace, so what the hell are we going to talk about?”

Under the circumstances, no one expects quick agreement. “You’re not going to have magic overnight,” a senior White House official said. “These guys haven’t talked to each other for a long time. They have to learn how to talk to each other. To say that there’s a lack of trust is an understatement.

“In a sense, you want it to take time,” he says, “because it’s going to take time for it to work.”

In issuing invitations to Madrid, the United States and the Soviet Union called for Israel and the Palestinians to begin their new negotiations at the point where the Camp David-generated autonomy talks broke down a decade ago. By agreeing to attend the conference, both sides agreed to use the Camp David framework as the basis for the talks.

This in itself shows real progress even before the conference begins. Palestinian leaders, who for years derided Camp David as a trap and a sellout, have now tentatively agreed to accept that formula. They still don’t like it much, but they now say it affords their best hope of ending Israeli military rule.

In 1978, when Sadat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin met with then-President Carter at Camp David, they agreed to give the Palestinians what Begin called “full autonomy.” When the Palestinians scorned the plan, Egypt attempted to negotiate on their behalf in talks with Israel. But the exercise led nowhere, and in 1981 it was quietly shelved.

In Madrid, Israeli and Palestinian bargainers will start with an agreement already in hand to do their best to establish a Palestinian self-governing authority within one year. Although the purpose of the negotiations is to establish the powers and scope of that authority, it is generally assumed that the plan will allow West Bank and Gaza Palestinians to take control of their own education, welfare, taxation and some police functions while permitting the Israelis to continue to handle security, foreign policy and relations between Arabs and Jewish settlers.

In 1981, just before the autonomy talks collapsed, Israel offered to share authority over land and water in the occupied territories. In effect, that would require the Israeli government and the Palestinian authorities to cooperate by giving each side a veto over land and water programs.

Assuming that the negotiators eventually agree on all details of the autonomy plan, Palestinians would enjoy limited self-rule for a “transition” period of five years. Within three years of the start of that period, negotiations would begin on the “final status” of the territories. Those talks will almost certainly be even more complex and difficult than the earlier phase.

The Palestinians want the final status to be an independent state, possibly in confederation with Jordan. The Israelis want to continue limited self-government indefinitely. Each side rejects the proposal of the other.

In an effort to break the looming deadlock, a number of possible compromises have been suggested. For instance, a recently published book by Mark Heller, an Israeli academic, and Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian professor and a member of the “advisory committee” to the Palestinian delegation in Madrid, proposes a system of overlapping authority. Heller and Nusseibeh suggest the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, but they argue that citizens of either Israel or the Palestinian state should be free to travel, work or even live in the other.

“Someone will have to invent political concepts that haven’t been in much use recently,” says William B. Quandt, a former National Security Council expert on the Middle East. “They will sound rather funny. You will need things like dual sovereignty, overlapping sovereignty. It will not be possible to simply draw a line and say one group stays on one side and the other on the other.”

The Israel-Syria talks will have no agreed-upon framework. And each side has made it clear that it will come to the table with strident positions that are anathema to the other. Syria wants to get back the Golan Heights, offering in exchange little more than a promise of nonbelligerency. Israel wants a peace treaty and full diplomatic relations with Syria, but it is unwilling to relinquish any of the Golan, which it formally annexed in 1981.

A senior U.S. official acknowledges that Israel and Syria come to the talks with diametrically opposed positions. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that before they get together and negotiate, that we’ve already changed their positions,” he says. “(But) we got the Syrians to commit to something they’ve refused to do for 43 years--sit down face to face with Israel in a process whose objective is real peace . . . and reconciliation.”

If the Israelis and the Syrians are able to see beyond their emotions, agreement may be possible. But the Golan Heights is an inflammatory issue. Israel insists that retaining the Golan Heights is vital to its security because in the years that preceded the 1967 war, Syrian forces used the high ground to bombard Israeli communities with artillery fire. Israelis vow that they will never again run that risk. On the Syrian side, the Golan Heights symbolizes the Israeli occupation--the unfinished business of war.

“Life is very tough in the Middle East,” says Benjamin Begin, a member of the Israeli Parliament and an announced candidate to succeed Shamir in the post that was once held by his father, Menachem. “It would be tougher, close to impossible, if Israel relinquishes any part of the Golan Heights.”

Begin’s view is widely shared in Israel, especially among those who are suspicious of the Madrid conference. But high ground such as the Golan is less important militarily in this day of ballistic missiles than it was in 1967. So even some of Israel’s staunchest friends believe that Jerusalem could consider changes in the status of the Golan if the Syrians are ready to deal.

“What is crucial is whether the Israelis indicate, in a clear-enough way, that the Golan Heights are negotiable, and whether that will provide enough of an opening for (Syrian President Hafez) Assad to begin to talk about security and peace,” says Martin Indyk, executive director of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Indyk suggests that Israel might offer to relinquish Majdal Shams, a Druze village just over the border from Syria, in exchange for a Syrian agreement to demilitarize it. “If the Israelis were to make this offer, you might have the elements of an interim territorial deal . . . (that) symbolically could be used by Assad . . . to justify continued negotiations,” he says. “Then there are all sorts of things they could talk about.”

But in the final analysis, it may be up to the United States to find ways to keep the process going.

“The key thing is that the Americans must intervene each time there is a setback,” says Jean-Pierre Langellier, foreign editor of the Paris newspaper Le Monde. “I remember when Jimmy Carter commented that the Middle East is a full-time job. If the U.S. puts its full power behind the process, it has a chance to succeed over the years.”

Times staff writers Doyle McManus in Washington, Daniel Williams in Jerusalem, Kim Murphy in Cairo and Rone Tempest in Paris contributed to this report.

AGENDA FOR THE MIDEAST TALKS

This week’s Middle East peace conference in Madrid will involve a complex set of interests and demands by each of the major participants. Here is a summary of the major goals and proposals put forward so far:

ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS

1. The conference begins where Camp David left off. That means “best effort” negotiations aimed at establishing within one year a self-governing administration for West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians. This limited self-rule would cover strictly domestic government. Israel would retain control of defense, foreign policy and, for the most part, police. Within three years of the start of the interim self-governing period, negotiations are supposed to begin on the “final status.” Israel wants that to be a continuation of the autonomy period; the Palestinians want a full-fledged state.

The final status need not be the either/or of the parties’ initial positions. Over the years, there have been a number of proposals for some sort of shared sovereignty, most recently in a book co-written by Sari Nusseibeh (a member of the Palestinian “advisory committee” to the Madrid delegation) and an Israeli academic. This latest plan calls for establishment of a Palestinian state with severe limits on military activity but “porous borders” that would permit free movement of goods and people between the states. Jews and Arabs would be allowed to hold citizenship in their own state but live anywhere they wish on either side of the line.

Arab hard-liners insist on a Palestinian state encompassing all the territory now held by Israel that was in Arab hands before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. But this demand is clearly unrealistic. If there is a settlement requiring any sort of Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory, it will require new borders, essentially allowing Israel to keep some of the occupied territory while relinquishing the rest.

Jordan controlled the eastern part of Jerusalem from 1948 until 1967. Palestinians consider the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem to be the capital of their proposed state. However, Israel flatly refuses to consider any change in the present status of Jerusalem. Most experts believe that Jerusalem is the most difficult of all Israeli-Palestinian disputes to solve.

Shortly after the 1967 war, Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal Alon said Israel was willing to relinquish the major population centers of the West Bank and Gaza but would retain Jerusalem and strategic points in the West Bank. The so-called Alon plan called for Israel to retain military outposts along the mountain ridges east of Jerusalem, in effect cutting the West Bank off from the Jordan river and the kingdom of Jordan. The Arabs rejected the plan and it now has very little support in Israel. However, some of the elements may be incorporated in any ultimate settlement.

ISRAEL-SYRIA

2. The issues here are stark and polar: Syria wants to regain “every inch” of the Golan Heights, while Israel, which captured the territory in 1967 and annexed it in 1981, refuses to consider withdrawing from any of it. Although the prospects for compromise do not seem promising, some Middle East experts believe that Israel will ultimately return most of the territory in exchange for demilitarization of the area and other restrictions on Syrian sovereignty there.

3. ISRAEL-LEBANON

Lebanon wants Israel to withdraw its military forces from bases in southern Lebanon and to end its support for the “South Lebanon Army,” an Israeli-organized and -financed militia of mostly Christian Lebanese. Israel maintains that its control of the southern Lebanon strip is necessary for its security. So far, no compromise suggestions have emerged.

ISRAEL-JORDAN

4. Unlike Israel’s other immediate neighbors, the Jordanians have no territorial claims against Israel. Jordan controlled the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, but King Hussein has relinquished all Jordanian claims in favor of the Palestinians. Israel wants a peace treaty and full diplomatic relations with Jordan (and all other Arab states). Jordan wants to keep its border with Israel quiet and peaceful. Most experts believe that the Israeli-Jordanian talks will be perfunctory at the start. If Israel reaches an agreement with other Arab parties, Jordan will happily join in the overall settlement.