Keep a Light On for Mideast

The Bush administration was reluctant from its earliest days to involve itself too intimately in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it didn’t think either side was ready to stop fighting and start talking again. But the report on the violence issued in May by the international commission headed by former Sen. George J. Mitchell all but compelled Washington to reconsider its approach.

Among other steps, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell went to the region and met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. That high-profile investment of U.S. prestige yielded only disappointing results. It increasingly appears that the administration’s initial instincts were right. Neither Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon nor Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is interested in breaking the impasse, and absent that the United States can do little.

American officials have concluded, as a number of them told Times correspondent Robin Wright, that Arafat is incapable of leading his people to peace and statehood because he is unwilling to be honest with them about the concessions that would be required. Meanwhile, Sharon, who detests Arafat and distrusts Palestinians, insists that any solution to the conflict remains decades away. In his recent meeting with President Bush he outlined an untenable plan for a settlement that would give Palestinians only about half the West Bank, with statehood coming in perhaps 20 or 30 years. The Arafat and Sharon approaches have one thing in common: Each guarantees a continuous state of low-level violence, growing economic enervation and increasingly demoralized populations.

Previous Israeli leaders--Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak--spoke candidly about the compromises Israel must make for peace, and opinion polls regularly showed that most Israelis would accept major concessions to end the conflict. But Arafat has done nothing to prepare Palestinians for the concessions peace requires. A year ago he rejected an offer from Barak--the best he is likely to get from any Israeli leader--that would have given Palestinians more than 90% of the West Bank and a major position in Jerusalem. At the same time Arafat continues to insist that all Palestinians who once lived in Israel and their descendants have a right to return.

It’s a diplomatic truism that to succeed as an intermediary the United States cannot want a settlement to the conflict more than Israelis and Arabs do. For now Israeli and Palestinian leaders refuse even to think about the compromises on which peace would have to be based. In these bleak circumstances Washington can only make unmistakable its dissatisfaction with both sides, while keeping a light in the window in case Sharon and Arafat conclude that maybe they could use some help after all.