A Step on a Long Road

After 19 months of negotiating inertia and nine long, touch-and-go days of U.S.-brokered bargaining, Israeli and Palestinian leaders have slogged their way a little closer to the goal of ending their half-century of conflict. The interim agreement reached at Wye Plantation in Maryland this week basically implements some of the principles first outlined five years ago in the secret talks in Oslo that launched the peace process. Ahead lies the enormously difficult task of dealing with such remaining issues as the status of Jerusalem, water rights, more Israeli withdrawals and final borders.

Under this week’s deal, Israel is to hand over another 13% of the West Bank to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. The authority in turn promises to become more proactive, with help from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, in preventing Palestinians from using violence against Israelis to sabotage the peace process. It also undertakes to expunge anti-Israel provisions from the Palestinian charter. These and other points were agreed to after the usual theatrics, threats and last-minute snags that characterize all Israeli-Arab negotiations had several times seemed to place the talks in jeopardy. With timely intervention by President Clinton and other American officials, as well as by Jordan’s ailing King Hussein, those impediments were overcome. But the continuing mistrust that so largely defines the relationship between Arafat and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains visible and threatening.

That absence of trust has its somber counterpart in American-Israeli relations. Clinton and Netanyahu have never been close, even though they are capable of working together. But Netanyahu’s apparent final-hour effort to extract a major political concession from Washington can only have brought a new chill to the two leaders’ relationship.

For years, Israel has sought the release from prison of Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. naval intelligence employee who was convicted of espionage in 1986 after confessing that he provided Israel with a huge amount of classified information. Clinton has several times refused to release Pollard, whose commutation from a life sentence is strongly opposed by the Justice and Defense departments and the CIA. Netanyahu claimed that an understanding was reached at Wye to release Pollard as part of the overall deal. U.S. officials deny that, and indeed it’s hard to imagine that Clinton, however eager for a diplomatic success he may have been, would have agreed to throw Pollard into the deal. The delay in signing the Wye agreement because of the dispute over Pollard was an irrelevancy that tarnishes what was accomplished.

This accomplishment was denounced in advance by both Palestinian and Israeli foes of the peace process. Violence to try to sabotage the interim agreement has to be anticipated. Netanyahu, whose coalition government depends on support from groups that are dead set against withdrawal from the West Bank, faces a threatened revolt that could bring on a major political realignment or early elections.

But one more arduous step on the long road to peace has been taken. Had it been taken a year or more earlier, as it certainly could have been, the goal of a final settlement between two peoples who desperately need peace would be that much closer.