Status Quo a Bearable Outcome

The leaders of Israel and the Palestinians have agreed on the need to end the confrontation that has all but erased every advance toward peace made over the last seven years. Now they must show they have the authority and the will to implement the agreement that they reached Tuesday at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheik. Their work won’t be easy, even with the best of intentions.

On both sides, the constituencies for moderation have been drastically reduced by the violence of the past few weeks. Radical Palestinians, cheered on by Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and others in the Arab world whose notion of an acceptable settlement is the extinction of Israel, promise to go on waging war in the streets, a tactic that is guaranteed to produce more deaths and deepen hatred. In Israel, the peace forces have suffered a major loss of credibility; support is growing for those who proclaim that the Palestinians can never be trusted and a hard line is the only answer.

The Sharm el Sheik agreement is, significantly, a verbal understanding and not a written commitment. As summarized by President Clinton it calls for a return to the pre-crisis situation. That essentially requires the Palestinian Authority to prevent mob actions and to re-incarcerate the recently released leaders of the extremist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It requires Israel to pull back the forward forces it deployed near Palestinian towns and end its closure of the Gaza airport. The United States will lead a “fact-finding” committee “on the events of the past several weeks,” an alternative to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s demand for a broad international investigation into the causes of the violence. Finally, if only pro forma, the United States will consult with the parties about restarting peace talks.

Credit is due those, especially Clinton and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who brought the two sides together and persuaded them to endorse measures necessary to defuse the crisis. But from here on it will be up to Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and those they command to restore and maintain order. It’s clearly much too soon to begin trying to reconstruct the shattered peace process. The best the United States can do is encourage both sides to behave responsibly, in their actions and their rhetoric, and to keep them focused on the future. The status quo may be widely seen as unacceptable. But in the absence of peace, the alternative--unremitting conflict and destruction--would be unbearable.