THE WORLD : ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN ACCORDS : How U.S. Can Keep Mideast Talks Moving

Optimism about the prospects for Palestinian-Israeli peace substantially increased when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres announced a possible breakthrough in their efforts to implement the second stage of the Declaration of Principles agreement. But disagreement soon broke out over what had been agreed on. As the two sides race against a new target date for resolving their differences, a flaw in the negotiations has emerged that, unless corrected, will continue to jeopardize the peace process--the absence of an arbitrator. Only the United States can play this role.

Stage II is perhaps the most significant part of the agreement signed at the White House in September, 1993. It calls for redeployment of Israeli forces from Palestinian “population centers” in the West Bank, to be followed by Palestinian elections there. Few believed that Israel had much interest in controlling Gaza, and Jericho is tiny, so when Israeli troops left to make room for Palestinian autono- my-- Stage I-- the cheering was muted. Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank, on the other hand, would underscore its commitment to peace. As for the Palestinian leaders, the extent to which they succeed in garnering popular support in democratic elections would be a measure of their credibility and legitimacy.

Delay after delay has plagued Stage II; the new deadline is July 25--more than a year after the original target. Although the parties are likely to reach some agreement on expanding Palestinian autonomy, the absence of an arbitrator makes it certain that key issues will be further postponed--rendering the process more vulnerable to violent opponents.

The principal impediment to progress is Israeli security needs, which are aggravated by the presence of more than 130,000 Jewish settlers adjacent to most Palestinian centers of population. Hebron, with a population of more than 100,000 Palestinians and only a few hundred Jewish settlers, is a case in point. The Israelis don’t want to leave now, or soon, fearing for the settlers’ safety, and they don’t want to pay the political costs at home of forcibly removing them. To Palestinians, such Israeli behavior violates the agreement--Hebron is obviously a “population center”--and threatens the possibility of fair, democratic elections unaffected by occupation forces. Postponing redeployment also gives more ammunition to foes of peace.

The need for some kind of arbitration mechanism to get around such dilemmas is now apparent. Any doubts should have been dispelled when an Israeli threat to expropriate Arab land in Jerusalem led to the United States’ first use of its U.N. Security Council veto in the post-Cold War era. That crisis, though subsequently defused, revealed significant shortcomings in the U.S. role in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

In the first place, the issue of Jerusalem should not have reached the United Nations. The Palestinians took it to the Security Council because they have no other mechanism for arbitrating their dispute with Israel. The Clinton Administration has vowed not to intervene in the bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians--a sensible approach were it not carried to an absurd extreme. The trouble is that even when interpreting and implementing the limited agreements already reached, important disputes remain, especially on Jerusalem and Jewish settlements. Because Israel controls the territories, the disputes can be resolved by unilateral Israeli actions, which leave Palestinians feeling helpless and foes of the pact emboldened.

The establishment of a U.S. arbitration mechanism to identify violations of the agreements would not only restore Israeli and Palestinian confidence in the process, it would also prevent the U.S. Congress from intervening. Congress regularly mulls punishing the Palestine Liberation Organization, by withholding aid, for violations of the accords--without considering Israeli infractions. But Congress, when not the United Nations, ends up arbitrator largely because the Administration has failed to lay down markers for the Palestinians and the Israelis.

It is no secret that much of the Administration’s diplomatic energy has been invested in Syrian-Israeli negotiations. A Syrian-Israeli deal, indeed, would help cement Arab-Israeli peace, and the sooner an agreement is reached the better, because electioneering will soon begin in both Israel and the United States. But both Syria and Israel are powerful states that will ultimately have to make a deal in any case, even if they fail to agree in the next few months. By contrast, the Palestinian-Israeli accords are racing against time, weakened by deteriorating economic, political and physical conditions. Further delay may be a prescription for failure.

And the price of failure may be too high. Although some have persuaded themselves that the Palestinian issue is no longer consequential for Middle East politics, Arab fury over Israeli moves in Jerusalem and the U.S.’s Security Council veto, which provoked warnings from the kings of Morocco and Jordan that they might halt normalizing relations with Israel, prove otherwise. There are always other surprises in store. The time has come for the United States to give the Palestinian-Israeli talks a higher priority and to display a new willingness to call Palestinians and Israelis on their violations of the accords when they occur.