Shredding the Oslo Accords

President Clinton is eager to hear a credible proposal for further Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank when he meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House next week, but expectations are anything but high. The Israeli Cabinet, as it prepares an offer to transfer a bit more land to the Palestinian Authority, has drafted extensive guidelines for any future negotiations over the disputed territory. They assert sweeping territorial claims and are hedged with scores of conditions. Taken at face value, they effectively make a dead letter of the Oslo accords that are the foundation of the peace process.

While no maps accompany the guidelines, there is no mistaking the destination they chart. Israel would claim permanent control over the eastern and western portions of the West Bank and, expectably, over Jerusalem and its environs. It would retain all of its settlements and military bases and continue to control highways, water resources and electricity. Palestinians would be left with noncontiguous bits and pieces of land that would make a viable state impossible.

Israeli hard-liners see the plan as a realistic answer to their security concerns. If realism means a practical readiness to face hard facts, their plan is no more realistic than the demands of the Palestinians to possess the entire West Bank, including East Jerusalem as the capital of the state they intend to proclaim. A dispassionate realism would recognize that a peace accord is achievable only if it evolves out of territorial compromises and political concessions.

U.S. officials have said they would be prepared to offer some settlement ideas of their own if the deadlock cannot be broken. They had better have those ideas ready. The signs are that Clinton is headed toward a frosty meeting with Netanyahu next Tuesday and probably an equally unproductive session with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a few days later. No American leader can dictate peace terms to the two sides. The best to be hoped for is that U.S. mediation can bridge differences when both sides want to have that happen. That hope is rapidly slipping away. The time may be near when the most effective step Washington can take would be to suspend its peacemaking efforts and wait until it again is invited to serve as honest broker.