Keeping Radicals From Sabotaging Peace

Today’s elections in Jerusalem and 157 other Israeli municipalities have been pre-defined by the major national political parties as a referendum on the Israeli-Palestine Liberation Organization peace accord. That may not be what voters have in mind; even in the midst of the most momentous international change, such municipal concerns as potholes and sewage system quality tend to intrude. Even so, it’s almost inevitable that if Labor Party candidates do well Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin will claim that his policy of talking with the PLO has been endorsed, while if Likud candidates make gains the leading opposition party will boast that its suspicions about dealing with the PLO are shared by most Israelis.

In fact, no matter what the outcome of today’s elections--and probably they will be mixed--the Israel-PLO talks should continue to edge toward interim Palestinian self-rule. But what seems certain to continue as well are the efforts by radical rejectionists on both sides to destroy the fragile basis of minimal trust and tolerance on which the talks rest. The weekend’s violent events in the West Bank, which saw an Israeli murdered and Jewish settlers responding with acts of anti-Palestinian vandalism and intimidation, threaten to become increasingly familiar.

The extremist Muslim groups that claim to be behind the killings of a number of Israelis in recent weeks want no compromise agreement between Israel and the PLO that would deny them their maximum objectives, foremost of which is nothing less than the disappearance of the Jewish state. Hard-line Israeli opponents of the peace process, many of them settlers, cite this threat to underscore their security concerns and--in the case of the most radical of the Israeli opponents of the peace process--to justify their call for not simply holding on to all of the West Bank but even expelling the Arabs who live there.

A showdown between the pro-accord PLO and its radical opponents seems inevitable, just as a decisive confrontation between Rabin’s government and those Israelis who would use vigilantism and other lawlessness to undermine the accords may become unavoidable. Responsible political leaders on both sides are understandably loath to move toward open internecine conflict. But events may soon rob them of any choice.

The United States, under whose aegis the peace process has revived and progressed, will certainly be called on to act as a guarantor of its results. The first need is to make sure that there will in fact be a peace to guarantee. That’s one reason Washington would be right to use all of its influence to insist that both sides act vigorously now to restrain the radicals who aim to subvert the opportunity that generations have waited for.