It was drama worthy of the Bible: the long-warring children of Abraham gathered in the sunbaked wilderness before a goat's-hair tent to swear to a covenant of peace, to take a bloodless oath to fulfill Isaiah's vision: "The desert shall rejoice and bloom." Presiding over it all was a ruler from afar, seeking refuge from domestic political siege in a triumphant foreign policy pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Cynics may carp that the scene was worthier of a Cecil B. DeMille movie or Bill Clinton's White House spinmeisters than of Isaiah. But the practical and immediate implications of the historic Israel-Jordan accord make it potentially the most significant Mideast agreement that Washington and the president have nurtured to date. For true peace is more than the mere absence of war. The Israel-Jordan desert pact facilitates instant and unheard-of cooperation on everything from electric grids to water sharing to tourism to mutual security. And what is the Washington-sponsored Mideast peace process ultimately for, if not to normalize a once psychotically abnormal neighborhood?
The success of this latest pact should coax additional Arab states to join in -- most of the gulf emirates, Tunisia and others that almost but haven't quite come to terms with a Jewish state they long regarded as a pariah.
We are forewarned: The path to full Mideast peace remains as perilous as Moses's 40-year trek through the desert. The Hamas and Hezbollah faithful, fuming over this latest step ahead, will inevitably renew terror attacks in hopes of sabotaging future advances. Even the Palestine Liberation Organization's Yassir Arafat and Syria's President Hafez Assad have been loudly mean mannered about it.
Still, for all the whining, the Israel-Jordan peace treaty should prod both Arafat and Assad into reluctant understanding that dragging feet and trying to delay an inexorable process risk their own political momentum and the gains their peoples stand to make through peace.
That was Bill Clinton's prime message first to the governor of Gaza, and two days later to the master of Damascus as they sat and talked through interpreters in the marble halls of Assad's ironically isolated "People's Palace." The Syrian leader, unused to direct questions from a free press, spelled out little in public detail but made what he considers a firm commitment: "We want peace."
Syria is a Mideast keystone, and Assad probably means what he says. If he does, his message, and the president's Knesset call for courage, may reassure the nervous people of Israel who almost unanimously applaud the accord with Jordan but still face terrorist attacks that undermine their sense of personal security.
Seeing the peace process through will require the kind of courage that brought to the desert ceremony Yehuda Waxman, father of the Israeli soldier who died in October's Hamas kidnapping. "I don't want to look back," he said. "I want to look forward." So did Isaiah.
