TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040389/04038900.037

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.9 KB | 81 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 20

America Abroad

How to Move the Immovable


By Strobe Talbott


    Yitzhak Shamir personifies intransigence. Wherever he goes,
even if it is just to his office in Jerusalem, he is attended
by low expectations for Arab-Israeli diplomacy. Still, his visit
to Washington next week could advance the cause of peace if his
encounters with the American President, Congress and the Jewish
community reinforce the message he has been getting back home:
something has to give on the occupied territories.

    Shamir believes that Israel has a historic birthright to
the lands it seized from Jordan in the 1967 War. After 21 years
of Israeli rule and settlements in the West Bank, Palestinian
Arabs still outnumber Jews there 16 to 1. For demographic
reasons alone, it is hard to see how "Greater" Israel can remain
a Jewish state and still be a true democracy. Nor is an Israel
whose soldiers are ordered to break teenagers' bones the "light
unto the nations" that its Zionist founders wanted.

    Not incidentally, those founders -- David Ben-Gurion and
Chaim Weizmann -- detested the Stern Gang that was implicated
in terrorist bombings and assassinations. Shamir was one of its
most notorious members. If Israel refuses to budge on the West
Bank, it could, over time, become just another Levantine war
zone pretending to be a country, in which latter-day equivalents
of the Stern Gang battle with the most extremist of the
Palestinians.

    Like all other Administrations since 1967, the new
leadership in Washington believes that Israel must at some point
trade some of the West Bank for peace. The U.S. opened a
dialogue with the P.L.O. last year because it hoped the
organization was redefining the first two words of its name: the
"Palestine" to be "liberated" is on the West Bank; it does not
include pre-1967 Israel. As part of an eventual agreement, the
U.S. is looking for reciprocal territorial concessions by
Israel.

    But forcing the issue now will do no good and could do harm
by giving Shamir an excuse to dig in his heels. Likud has
consolidated its strength in recent local elections, so it would
be folly to peg American diplomacy to the more pliable policies
of the weakened Labor Party.

    Left to his own devices and instincts, Shamir would come to
the U.S. with his jaw out, his dukes up and nothing in his
pocket. The idea of a "Shamir initiative" sounds like a
contradiction in terms. His preferred role is still that of
defiant custodian of the status quo.

    But the status quo is untenable. That is the message Shamir
has been getting not just from the Palestinian stone throwers
but from their antagonists in the Israeli army as well. It is
a reminder of the enduring humanism and idealism of the Zionist
state that many of its warriors hate breaking bones and say so
to their Prime Minister.

    So Shamir knows he needs to make a move, if only to escape
the impression that he alone is standing still while events run
beyond his control. He is expected to arrive with a proposal for
elections among the Palestinians in the West Bank, followed by
negotiations between those elected representatives and Israel.
He wants to buy time by avoiding the question of whether Israeli
withdrawal from -- and Arab sovereignty over -- the West Bank
might someday be on the agenda of those negotiations. The Bush
Administration will probably not insist that he bless the idea
of territorial compromise in advance, but as his part of the
bargain he had better not rule it out forever. That would
probably be as much flexibility as the U.S. or the Arabs are
likely to get out of this Israeli leader. But it might be enough
to restart the diplomatic process; and perhaps that process will
continue long enough for other Israeli statesmen to decide where
it finally leads.