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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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THE WEEK, Page 19WORLDCan It Be? Progress in Mideast Talks?
Yes, a bit, in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and even the Golan
Heights
Journalists have long joked that the headline MIDEAST PEACE
HOPES DIM could run over a story written today, next year or,
probably, in A.D. 2030. That may no longer be the case. As the
intermittent Israeli-Arab talks that began in Madrid 10 months
ago resumed in Washington, Palestinians and representatives of
Israel's new Labor-led government got down to serious
discussions over a substantive matter: how a proposed elected
council might be empowered to bring a measure of self-government
to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Eager to tone
down animosity, Jerusalem's negotiators have stopped referring
to the West Bank by the biblical names Judea and Samaria.
There was even a sign of possible progress on what has
been one of the most intractable of all Middle East issues: the
Golan Heights. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had insisted
that the area was so vital to Israel's security that Jerusalem
could never give the tiniest bit back to Syria. But his
successor, Yitzhak Rabin, says the principle of trading land for
peace applies to the area, and Israel need not "cling to every
single centimeter."
None of which signals the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
Israel is nowhere near meeting Syria's demand that it get all
of the Golan back. On the issue of the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
there is a wide gap between the Israeli proposal for an
"administrative" council and Palestinian demands for a
"legislative" body, an embryo parliament for a Palestinian
state. But gone are the days when, as Palestinian delegate
Ghassan Khatib puts it, "proposals were prepared for
confrontation, not agreement." Propaganda ideas are yielding to
suggestions that might be negotiable. Someday. Maybe.