PERSPECTIVE ON MIDEAST PEACE : A Small Step for Mankind : The peace process has brought Israel full circle, back home to the original ideology of its founders.

Readiness to share West Bank territory with an Arab authority is not a sudden innovation sprung on the Israeli people by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. It has been the attitude of Israelis from the earliest days of our state. “Territories for peace” is the classic, historic Israeli bipartisan idea.

There have been several signposts on the road that led to the signature of last week’s accord. The Jewish people first passed from precarious solitude to sovereignty, military success, international recognition and mass immigration in the astonishing period of 1947 to 1949. President Truman said to me in March of 1952: “You succeeded because what your leaders proposed was practical and feasible and what your opponents proposed was not.”

The context was that Jewish critics wanted 100% for Israel, while the Arabs wanted 100% for themselves.

The tradition of Israeli realism prevailed once more in 1967 when the Israeli Cabinet resolved that the change resulting from the 1967 victory should be in terms of a changed regional order rather than an explosively radical change in the territorial map. As foreign minister in the 1967 cabinet, I was empowered to offer peace treaties to Egypt and Syria on the basis of the international boundaries, which would have meant the renunciation of Sinai and the Golan. I was later charged to offer the Jordanian leadership the restoration of most, though not all, of the West Bank.

The Arab side was not willing at that time to offer the peace terms that might have made these proposals operative and they justly lost some non-recurring territorial opportunities.

In 1977 to 1979 came the next dramatic phase of Israeli realism; Menachem Begin signed the Camp David accord, which included provisions for the withdrawal of the Israeli military, and the Israeli civil administration, establishment of an elected Palestinian self-governing authority, constitution of a strong Palestinian police force and the determination of the permanent status of the West Bank and Gaza by “negotiation between Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the elected representatives of the Palestinian people.”

Short of personally planting a Palestinian flag in the West Bank and Gaza, it is hard to see how Begin could have done more to make a Palestinian state a strong probability. Rabin, assailed today by Jewish fundamentalists, has been much more cautious in dealing with Israel’s security concerns.

There were some periods of Likud rule during which Israeli policy was based on the principle that 100% of the West Bank and Gaza are Israel’s exclusive patrimony. But those years when our map extended “reassuringly” from Golan to Suez were the worst years for Israel security. Israeli rule in the territories was accompanied by four wars--the war of attrition with Egypt, the Yom Kippur war against Egypt and Syria, the war in Lebanon directed against the PLO but with many Lebanese casualties, and the intifada in which Palestinian nationalism locked horns with the Israeli forces. The Israeli death toll between 1967 and 1973 was measured in thousands, not dozens or scores.

Israel, under the leadership of the Rabin-Peres administration, is responding to three factors: the unacceptable death toll during the Greater Israel period; the agonizing paradox of Israeli democracy ruling a foreign, rebellious nation without offering equal citizenship or a right to secede into a separate jurisdiction, and the erosion of Israel’s international position.

The peace process has brought Israel home--back to the original pragmatism and ideology of its founders. The accord with the mainstream Palestinian organization is one of its fruits. So are the peace treaty with Jordan, diplomatic relations with Morocco, abandonment of the significant parts of the Arab boycott, the multiplication of Israeli contacts with the Arab states of North Africa and the Gulf, a friendlier environment in the United Nations, the reconciliation with the Vatican, better relations with Turkey and the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union and, above all, an intimate relationship with the United States for which “alliance” is too weak a word.

The media have a professional commitment to accidents and incidents and have naturally given much coverage to the difficulties of the peace process, too little to its gains. The signature of the Oslo 2 agreement enables Israelis to echo the words of the American pilgrim fathers after their first year on their new soil:

“We have made a clearing in the wilderness. Another year will see a larger clearing, a better garnering. All that we have made is a new beginning.”