Is Anyone Looking for an Honest Broker? : Washington is the only one to do it--if it’s asked

What happens over the coming three days in Madrid, at what is being described with perhaps excessive optimism as the conference to bring peace to the Middle East, could well be crucial in deciding what will happen in that war-blighted region for years and maybe even decades to come.

If Arabs and Israelis can get through the opening ceremonies and the expected accusatory and recriminatory speeches without one party or another stalking out in real or feigned fury; if they can pass on to the planned second phase, which calls for them to sit down in a concurrent series of direct bilateral negotiations, then there’s a chance that some progress could be made in coming months in reconciling their wildly differing notions of what is fair, just and ultimately acceptable. But to get to that point may take not just an act of political will but an act of faith.

PERVASIVE SUSPICION: Not in modern memory have parties to international disputes sat down together as equals in an atmosphere so heavy with distrust and hatred. Israel distrusts the Arabs and, increasingly, its government distrusts the United States, which it worries has adopted a policy of evenhandedness that has not just effectively suspended the longstanding U.S.-Israeli special relationship but is actually inimical to Israel’s basic interests. The Arabs reciprocally distrust Israel and, of no less significance to the fate of the conference, they fear and distrust each other, with each delegation suspecting that at some point its hopes and goals will be betrayed by the others. Arabs and Israelis have agreed only with ill-disguised reluctance to gather in Madrid at the invitation of Washington and Moscow. Perhaps the one thing these bitter foes have in common at the outset is their shared suspicion that no good can come of this conference.

The United States is there to try to prove them wrong.

Washington, as President Bush again made clear over the weekend, has no grand plan of its own to break the inevitable deadlocks that will occur if and when bilateral negotiations get under way. Least of all does it have the intention--or the means--to try to impose a settlement on antagonists who could well prove incapable of reaching agreement by themselves. The United States will be there, as Secretary of State James A. Baker III has said, to serve as a mediator if it is asked by the parties concerned to do so. The mediator’s role can be a thankless one, inviting calumny and abuse. It can also be absolutely essential to fostering progress. It is impossible to conceive of the Arab-Israel military disengagement agreements of the mid-1970s or of Egypt and Israel’s Camp David peace treaty without American mediation--American because the United States was the only power then respected and trusted by all sides.

AVAILABLE MEDIATION: The mediator can be a face-saver, a conciliator, a message carrier. The mediator can propose ideas that, coming from anyone else, would elicit automatic rejection. The mediator can suggest compromises that the parties directly involved might fear to propose lest they be seen as weakening in their resolve. The mediator can often find a formula to keep things going when an impasse develops.

But two things must occur before the United States can be an effective mediator. Its good offices must be sought by both sides, and both sides must be genuinely interested in achieving practical results. These are not givens, by any means, for if Arab and Israeli leaders are to be taken at their word the very thought of compromise on fundamental issues is regarded as anathema. These at least are the public positions.

What Washington will be looking for in the days ahead are subtle signs of flexibility to indicate that, whatever advance oratory may suggest, at some point its mediation will be welcomed.