A Time of Mideast Reassessment

Secretary of State Warren Christopher is revisiting the Middle East to assess where the U.S.-sponsored peace process stands after last month’s Israeli elections and last weekend’s Arab summit conference in Cairo and, it goes without saying, to exhort the key figures in that process not to let it flag.

The chance of failure or at least of a halt is widely perceived to have grown since Benjamin Netanyahu’s election as prime minister. His platform ruled out the eventual emergence of a Palestinian state and made clear his government’s intention to maintain Israeli sovereignty over Syria’s Golan Heights. The purported shock of Netanyahu’s election sent 21 of the 22 members of the Arab League to a meeting in Cairo to try to agree on a common policy. The Cairo talks were notable because the most intransigent of the participants--led by Syria and Libya--were not permitted to again dictate the terms for Arab dealings with Israel.

The summit expectably restated the maximum Arab positions on key goals: an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan, southern Lebanon and the West Bank; a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. The summit rejected a call by Syria and others to halt all steps toward normalizing ties with Israel. It did say that if the Netanyahu government forsakes the principle of land for peace--for nearly 30 years the basis for a Middle East settlement--Arab states would have to “reconsider” their position on Israel. Compared to earlier communiques, this was mild stuff indeed.

The response from Jerusalem was also predictable: Israel will not be dictated to when it comes to peace terms, and it stands ready to continue negotiating without preconditions. How “without preconditions” squares with the conditions Netanyahu in fact insists on--no withdrawal from the Golan, no Palestinian state--remains to be explained.

Syria probably could not care less if its talks with Israel come to a dead stop. President Hafez Assad, after all, had four years to make progress with a much more accommodating Israeli government, led by Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. He chose instead to foot-drag and dissimulate, to the growing disgust of Christopher, who has journeyed to Damascus 20 times in a quest for greater Syrian flexibility. The Palestinians are another matter. It seems unlikely they will find much value in continuing peace talks with Israel if they conclude that their primary goal--an independent state--has been irrevocably ruled out, at least by the present Israeli government. Just what that government has in mind, Christopher hopes to find out. A major U.S. foreign policy investment is riding on the answer.