Go Ahead, Start Without Us : The truth is that the Shamir government is dead set against any exchange of land for peace

The second phase of the Middle East peace conference is scheduled to open in Washington Wednesday, with one chair notably empty. Israel, having failed to win U.S. acceptance of a number of its new demands, insists that its representatives won’t be ready to talk until Monday. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government professes to see no political risk arising from this mini-boycott, which will leave center stage to Israel’s Arab opponents. “After all,” suggests Yossi Ben-Aharon, one of Shamir’s top aides, “they can’t do anything without us.” Oh, yes, they can.

What “they”--the Arab participants in the planned series of concurrent negotiations--can do is validate the somber warnings being voiced by many in Israel itself: Shamir’s government, by magnifying a procedural disagreement with the United States into an unwinnable test of political wills, is courting a public relations disaster. For more than 40 years Israel has run into a stone wall of rejection when it sought face-to-face peace talks with its Arab foes. Washington provides the forum for such talks. Israel, by its no-show decision, is giving its opponents the chance to ask: Who is rejecting peace now?

Israel has offered a series of reasons for its refusal to appear when invited. The first--hurt diplomatic feelings that the invitations were publicly announced before Shamir saw President Bush in Washington last month--ignores the fact that the time and the place for the talks had in fact been pretty much nailed down weeks earlier, just as Israel’s objections were known weeks earlier. Delaying the invitations for a few hours would have changed nothing. Neither is it credible that Israel’s diplomats, who have known for months what would be on the agenda, were left (as claimed) without adequate time to prepare for a Dec. 4 start of talks.

There are two basic reasons for Israel’s initial absence. The first is its anger over being unable to get the U.S. assurances it wants that the Washington talks will last only for a session or two before moving to a site in or near the Middle East. The deeper reason is that the Shamir government, as it has so often announced, is dead set against any exchange of land for peace. Such a trade is not, however, only one of a number of theoretical possibilities arising from the talks. It is central to them, being based on U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, enacted in 1967 and accepted as the foundation for negotiating peace by all parties, including Israel. That process will be a little slower getting started than Washington had hoped. But at some point soon it must begin, because there is no acceptable alternative in sight.