Shimon Peres may provide a way out of impasse

By Martin Woollacott

LONDON: Shimon Peres is the last big card Israel had to play in the attempt to contain the fighting in the West Bank and Gaza. Because of his advocacy of peace in the past and because he stands above day to day politics, he has the weight to act as an envoy of last resort. So there is perhaps a chance that his intervention will succeed where the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement failed. It is not so much that Peres has a special relationship with Yasser Arafat or can bring arguments to bear that the Palestinian would not accept from anybody else.

This is not a matter of sentiment but of the fact that, if the Israelis and the Palestinians really want a way out, Peres could provide a label for it, allowing Arafat to meet some Israeli requirements without conceding anything directly to Ehud Barak, and Barak to redeploy some of his forces without this being seen as a huge victory for the Palestinians.

The daily suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians since this conflict ignited has not been of the same degree. The difference is that the Palestinians are suffering physically now, taking the bulk of the casualties and the physical damage to communities, yet imagine, as they have done before in times of violence and the elation violence sometimes brings, that a victory lies ahead. The Israelis have lost far fewer people, yet begin to perceive just how dangerous and dismal a future may lie before them.

For all that is written about how Israelis have never been free of their fears of Arab revenge, the clouds had begun to lift for them, and now have closed in again. The Israelis may speak of strong measures, but the reality is of conscript soldiers who, as time goes on, would start to fall to Palestinian fire, if never in the same numbers as their enemies but still in numbers intensely painful for a society that had begun to believe that all that was soon going to be over. The Palestinians may speak of fighting for as long as it takes to hoist their flag over Jerusalem, but must know that Israel has the means, both military and economic, to make life truly hellish in the territories, as opposed to merely nasty. They may feel, fecklessly or otherwise, that they can bear it, but would surely avoid if they could.

But not wanting war is not a sufficient condition for peace. If there is to be a change now, a shift away from fighting, it will be because lessons have been learned both from the failed diplomacy of the Oslo process and from the little war of the last six weeks. The lesson of the diplomacy is partly that leaders can confect arrangements that peoples will reject, but more specifically that Israel used its greater strength to try to impose terms too favorable to its interests.

At what point, if ever, it will begin to dawn on the majority of Israelis that the terms Ehud Barak offered at Camp David were not too generous, as they think at the moment, but not generous enough, is hard to know. But the lessons of the fighting are not irrelevant here, because as it has developed it has dramatized the issues that led to failure at Camp David. Palestinians confronted the Israeli presence in the territories by marching up to the camps and check points and stoning and shooting at them. They have gone on from that to make attacks on settlements and on the roads that sustain the settlements. And the fighting has, in some cases, come to the outskirts of East Jerusalem, and the violence, in the shape of bombers, to the heart of the city.

All this should be conveying to the Israelis that most of the settlements are not easily defended, that the military presence needed to sustain them is provocative, and that Jerusalem will be an endless cause of trouble unless it is fairly divided. Israelis may bitterly reflect that the degree of success of this new intifada owes much to the fact that they permitted the Palestinians to establish armed security forces but that, too, establishes a lesson.

Arafat's forces were designed, as the Israelis saw it, to protect Israel's security by keeping Palestinian extremists under control. But they could only fulfill that function if the Palestinians were on the road to a state worthy of the name.

A false symmetry often marks comment on the Middle East, distributing blame or assigning responsibilities to Israel and the Palestinians in equal measure. They are far from equal in strength, and they are not equally responsible. Much the greater responsibility rests with Israel. But there are also lessons for the Palestinians, whose ragged trousered triumphalism seems sometimes to know no limits and whose emotional conformism produces a repetitive and extreme rhetoric from the lips of every single leader and spokesman. The idea is abroad in the Arab world that Israel is on the run -- that it was pushed out of Lebanon and that it can be pushed out of other places, too. Countries can indeed be pushed -- but they can only be pushed so far, as the Palestinians themselves have demonstrated.

Jews and Arabs have fought in these lands now for three generations. In the 30s, Arab rebels fired on Jewish settlements, and repeatedly blew up the main oil pipeline, while Jewish soldiers in Orde Wingate's night squads staged lethal ambushes as Arab fighters set off from their villages. Military force then, and for many years afterwards, was an instrument of absolute solutions. Now it is exhausted, on both sides, except as a means of demonstrating limits. Yet, if a ceasefire of some kind should take hold this week, or at some future point, it will not mean that the old peace process resumes, even if the meetings that President Clinton hopes to hold this month with the two leaders do take place. Violence at some level will probably continue. It may move off the streets, because Palestinians are surely getting sick of the daily slaughter, but there could be more occasional, targeted Palestinian attacks and Israeli responses to them, and a bad tempered low level diplomacy full of excuses and accusations going on alongside.

The likelihood is that there will be a clash over what should replace Oslo, with the Palestinians demanding that a range of countries other than the United States, as well as the United Nations, be brought in to help set up a new framework for negotiations. The Israelis will resist this in favor of an interim bilateral agreement of some kind with the Americans continuing as referees. This would be a separation without settlement and could involve both some Israeli withdrawals and a claimed or even an agreed statehood. Separation without settlement may seem the least bad course to many Israelis, and the best course to some leaders like Ariel Sharon, but in reality it would solve nothing. What was unacceptable to the Palestinians in a settlement would be equally unacceptable without one, and would be bound to lead to further violence.

-- Guardian News Service