Five Years of Peacemaking in the Balance in Mideast

The archeological tunnel that Israel completed this week along Jerusalem’s Temple Mount has become the detonator for an explosion of deadly combat across the Gaza Strip and West Bank. As the fighting has escalated, Israel has sent in troop reinforcements and tanks, and the toll of dead and wounded on both sides has risen into the hundreds.

The potential for violence had been steadily growing among Palestinians as economic conditions in the territories under Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority worsened. Political hopelessness runs deep now. Before the Israeli national elections in May, there was reason to think that, after the usual political anguish and negotiating impasses had been overcome, a true peace could be achieved. For most Palestinians, as indeed for many Israelis, the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister and head of a right-wing coalition government proved to be a severe setback to those expectations.

Palestinians claim that the tunnel threatens the structural integrity of the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Archeologists dismiss that fear as baseless. But the suggestion from Netanyahu and Jerusalem’s Mayor Ehud Olmert that the tunnel is simply a historically interesting means for facilitating tourist foot traffic between sacred sites can at the same time be dismissed as disingenuous.

Whatever practical purposes it may serve, the tunnel, in the current context, is a powerful political symbol. Israel is determined that Jerusalem in its entirety will remain its capital. The Palestinians insist that at least a part of the city must serve as their national capital one day. Under the accord for negotiating a settlement, the city’s final status is to be resolved in future discussions. That’s why the previous Labor government chose not to take the last steps needed to complete work on the tunnel. The Netanyahu government, surely aware of the religious sensitivities that the tunnel’s opening would excite among Muslims, and certainly understanding the political significance of what it was doing, chose to press ahead. Even Netanyahu’s own defense minister, Yitzhak Mordecai, now questions whether the full implications of this decision were taken into account.

The fate of five years of U.S.-sponsored peacemaking now hangs in the balance. President Clinton has issued the usual call for calm on all sides and a return to negotiations, leaving it to the State Department’s spokesman to chide the Israeli government for its ill-conceived introduction of a provocative new element into the political equation.

Clearly, there are some in the Netanyahu government and among its supporters--just as there are Palestinian extremists--whose highest hopes would be satisfied if the peace process collapsed beyond any chance of early resuscitation. The greatest challenge to statesmanship on all sides is to prevent such a political catastrophe. That includes U.S. statesmanship. If ever there was a time for an American president to use all of his formidable powers of persuasion and pressure in behalf of saving peace, it’s now.