Washington Cannot Allow the Mideast Talks to Fail

The United States is working urgently to shore up the Middle East peace process, which seems to be headed inexorably toward collapse. But the Clinton administration is largely at a loss for effective ideas to get the Israelis and Palestinians talking again. In fairness, it’s getting precious little help from those it seeks to bring together. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scoffs at suggestions that Israel suspend work on its controversial new housing project in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority’s Yasser Arafat says he won’t return to the bargaining table until construction halts. Each leader, speaking more to his own constituency than to the other side, has used words that make compromise all but impossible.

An explosion of violence in the West Bank Tuesday underlined the difficulty and the potential for failure.

On Monday, at a huffy news conference after he met with President Clinton at the White House, Netanyahu repeated his familiar theme that Jerusalem is Israel’s sovereign capital and Israel will build where it pleases.

True, Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. It’s no less true that Israel is committed under the Oslo agreements to negotiating the city’s “final status” with the Palestinians within the next two years, a pledge that at least inferentially recognizes that some major issues are yet to be resolved. The housing project could have waited. It was pushed ahead by a Cabinet in which hard-liners who have never liked the peace process are determined to use every provocation to impede its progress. It produced the response that Israel’s security services had warned the government to expect.

Each day of absence from the negotiating table, each day of stone-throwing, fire-bombing and shooting, deepens the antagonists’ mutual distrust. Each day increases the odds of new terrorist outrages. Arafat seems unable to decide whether those Palestinians who are committed to preventing peace are allies or foes; one day he locks them up, the next he lets them go. Netanyahu, mindful of polls that show 75% of Israelis support the peace process, nonetheless caters to the minority that is eager to abandon that process.

Washington has always made clear that it can only facilitate steps toward peace, not impose a final settlement. But neither can Washington afford to let the peace process go under without a resolute and assertive effort to rescue it, not just because that is in the best interests of Israelis and Palestinians but because peace and stability in the Middle East are in the best interests of the United States. That imperative must guide American policy.