A Diplomacy of Optimism

Diplomacy has its own language and elaborately choreographed events. The formality of international statecraft, akin to a minuet, allows negotiators to precisely understand a given word or gesture, and it can transmit an exact message when an assistant minister instead of a Cabinet member, say, attends a meeting. Often symbols, protocol and setting are all-important. However, the stylized tapestry of diplomacy, developed over centuries, sometimes can impede progress in negotiations. So there are times when breaking out of the formal mold works, as in President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 Camp David talks with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin.

It may have been Camp David that Johan Jorgen Holst, Norway’s prime minister, was remembering when he invited negotiators for Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization into his family’s Oslo home and to the Norwegian countryside. By breaking diplomatic tradition--and by working one backbreaking 14-hour day after another--Holst gained an unprecedented agreement in this seemingly intractable dispute. He said later that the key was in providing negotiators a relaxed, informal atmosphere. In a way, Holst may have given his life for that hospitality. He died last week at 56 in an Oslo hospital, where he was recovering from a stroke apparently complicated by exhaustion.

Only a man with limitless faith in human nature could tackle the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between Israel and the PLO. Both sides owe it to Holst’s memory to keep trying.