Clock Ticking in the Mideast

The State Department has welcomed as “a step in the right direction” the Israeli Cabinet’s decision in principle to turn more of the West Bank over to the Palestinian Authority. But this cautious approval was simply the minimum possible response to a gesture of minimum significance. By failing to specify either the time or the extent of its next withdrawal, Israel’s fractious coalition government was able to keep itself from breaking apart over a fundamentally divisive issue, at the same time that it avoided pulling the plug on the moribund peace process. In substance, no movement has taken place.

The Clinton administration insists that Israel’s next pullback, which it committed itself to in both the Oslo accords and the Hebron agreement earlier this year, should be territorially meaningful and politically credible. Israeli papers have reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering turning over 6% to 8% more of the West Bank, hardly what Washington would see as meaningful. The Palestinians immediately rejected the leaked figures as wholly unrealistic, which they are.

At the same time the Palestinians continue to insist that they must control at least 80% of the West Bank before entering final status talks with Israel. That is as unrealistic as the paltry number Netanyahu is said to be thinking about eventually placing before his Cabinet. The positions of both sides seem calculated to assure that deadlock will remain unbroken.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has hurriedly scheduled meetings with Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat later this week. And the administration has hinted that its patience is running out and that it might have to go public with its own ideas on what a final agreement should look like. That could commit Washington to supporting the specific terms of a settlement. Given the impasse that for now seems unresolvable, the time for that bold step may soon be here.