PERSPECTIVE ON MIDDLE EAST PEACE : What Bliss to Fight With Words : At last, no one questions Israel’s existence; now, all that’s to be settled is how the former antagonists will coexist.

Today, Israel is entering into direct negotiations with its neighbors and with the Palestinian people. The object of these negotiations is to put an end to 70 years of war between Jews and Arabs and to inaugurate a new age. In due course the peace talks will lead to regional arrangements and a picture of a shared future: frontiers and security, water and trade, energy and pumps, tourism and cultural ties, and maybe eventually reconciliation and friendship.

It will be a long process. There will be no outburst of brotherly love: There is too much resentment and suspicion on both sides. The walls are not going to come tumbling down overnight. But we can definitely make a start today. Because the world order has changed, and so has the shape of the Middle East. Even here the time has come at last to stop dying and start living.

The starting positions on the Arab side are very difficult ones for Israel. Even for a moderate Israeli like me. The starting positions of the Shamir government are very difficult ones for the Arabs. Even for moderate Arabs. But we’ve got to remember, we’re talking about starting positions for negotiations, not for a bloody war. We shouldn’t be alarmed at the distance between the opening positions on either side. In any case, a nation that has defended itself against the whole Arab world single-handedly five times and won has no reason to quake with fear at the thought of sitting down at the negotiating table. And the thing to do at a negotiating table is not to give way to hysterics or sentimentality but to negotiate--positively, firmly, cunningly on occasion, magnanimously, but above all with breadth of vision. To be uncompromising about the essentials and not dig our heels in about what we can do without. The most important thing is to have the wisdom to distinguish between what is really vital and what we can give up in exchange for parallel concessions on the Arab side. The meaning of “negotiation,” as its Hebrew word implies, is “give and take.”

How to start? Maybe with an initial confidence-building process. Israel agrees to stop settling the occupied territories for the duration of the negotiations; the Arabs agree to end the intifada, to renounce terrorism absolutely, and to lift the boycott on Israel at once. America and Europe undertake to finance the settlement and absorption of a million Jews in Israel and a million Palestinian refugees outside Israel (that is, the new Israel, whatever borders are finally agreed upon).

This conference and the negotiations will drag on into humdrum bargaining over a strip of land here, a well or two there, inspection arrangements for this or guarantees for that. But even during the boring bits, when the lawyers are poring over the small print, let us never forget that behind the petty details there stands a historic victory for Zionism: At long last our enemies are confronting us not with tanks and missiles but with documents and sub-clauses. The same people who for 100 years have been demanding that we disappear, clear off, die, are now asking for compromises and concessions. And by doing so they are acknowledging publicly and openly that Israel is an established fact. This recognition is not easy for them. It’s hardly surprising that some of them are going to Madrid reluctantly, sullenly, shamefacedly.

How about us? Actually, we are entitled to come in smiling. Not ecstatically, but with the justified satisfaction of someone who has achieved within 100 years more than his forebears dreamed of; with the self-confidence of someone who firmly believed, even in times when it was very hard indeed to believe, that the day would come when the whole world--including our enemies--would accept the reality of Israel.

And now that day has come.

And from now on, even if there’s no honeymoon, there will be a normalization of the conflict. From this moment on, the question is not, as it was for 100 years or so, who will clear off and when. The question is who will get what. Now the complicated effort must begin to settle the dispute over territory, in spite of the desperate attempts of madmen and fanatics on both sides to change this conflict into a war of religion or an eternal holy struggle.

Today, the question of Israel’s existence has been struck off history’s agenda, to be replaced by the tricky but much easier question of who is to get what. Of how we are to live side by side. Of what this region is going to be like in the next century. So the question mark that has been hanging over Israel’s existence from the outset has been removed. Because the Arabs themselves have been compelled to remove it. And that is why we are entitled to say today--soberly but without too much gloom: Praise be to Him who has allowed us to live to see this day.